In 2020, biz will chuck $100bn+ at protecting itself online Security spending is predicted to grow from $73.7bn in 2016 to $101.6bn in 2020, according to analysts. This compound annual growth rate of 8.3 per cent, more than twice the rate of overall IT spending growth, will be increased security spending in healthcare as well as continued strong demand in banking and government. The …
The essential problem is that most firms spend money on defense, which is wasteful since all firms can be targeted equally easily. Instead of building pointless digital fortresses, the money would be better spent on offense: identifying hostile actors and hunting them down. Business and government need to work together to develop a counter-offensive which can more rapidly identify the path an attack has taken and reach the initiator of the attack.
Of course, it's way easier to describe this approach than implement it, and there's a lot of money to be made building pointless defenses in the meantime.
Plus there's the fact that most of the attackers can hide behind the sovereignty of hostile nations. What good is tracing your miscreant only to find it leads you to either Russia or China, neither of which could care less about what happens to the west (because they're tacitly supporting anything to give THEM a leg up) AND have the military force to counter any sort of intimidation (I mean, how do you intimidate a country with NUKES)?
While security is essential, it's difficult to describe some of recent development as anything else but paranoia (a very expensive one). Just like the overreaction following 911, now "cyber" security has become an excuse for runaway financial costs and privacy invasion that nobody has guts to reign in. Plus everyone hoards often unnecessary data that have to be secured. And then there's "think of children".
Most will keep using hopelessly insecure operating systems because they support some of their legacy systems and applications. With each "upgrade" some -but not all- of these must be deprecated, so they recommit by building new ones on top. That way they never have to admit that getting committed to such an amateurish hunk of junk was a mistake in the first place. They can make it to retirement with their pride intact.
So there is nothing to do.
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