The recent massive data breach at Facebook have brought to focus that if one of largest technology companies in the world can have their data compromised then any company, regardless of the security measures they may have in place is also vulnerable. This included sectors such as healthcare, banking, and transportation.
The CEO of Rapid7, a company which offers vulnerability management solutions, says that cybercriminals have recently realized that data is money and that vulnerabilities are happening because of our speed of innovation. This is compounded because almost all companies are in essence becoming software companies.
Corey Thomas, Rapid7 President and CEO, discussed the challenges of cybersecurity on CNBC this morning:
Cybersecurity Attacks Affecting the Fundamentals of Business
What we’re finding is that more and more things are actually causing people to really understand that cybersecurity attacks are going to affect the fundamentals of the business. I think with Facebook, it was the additional layer of so much turmoil and scrutiny already that it’s just another sign that it’s going to be troubling days ahead.
I was surprised by the recent breach in some ways because of how seriously Facebook takes security. On the other hand, when you look at the details of the breach it was completely understandable. They have lots of technologists, they’re moving fast, and the compromise itself and the vulnerability itself was the interplay of a whole bunch of different errors that actually went wrong at the same time.
We Have Not Designed Our Technology Ecosystem to be 100% Secure
One way to think about it is that we have not designed our technology ecosystem to be a 100 percent sure and secure. We value speed and one of the reasons that so many companies are successful is because they’re fast at building technology that all of us love and adopt and use. The side effect of that, unfortunately, is that speed comes at a cost.
Speed of Innovation Raises Security Risks
I don’t know if we’ll be able to put the speed of innovation genie back in the box. I do think we’re going to have to raise standards and I think there are lots of fundamental things that people can and should be doing.
What actually scares me more are not the Facebook’s of the world, because I think Facebook and many companies have good security. It’s the fact that our entire economy is becoming more digital and frankly most of the companies that are starting to actually turn their services into technologies that are digitally connected are just not as sophisticated with security as a company like Facebook.
Almost Every Company is Becoming a Software Company
If you look at healthcare and the transportation ecosystem we’re connecting more and more aspects of our lives and we’re turning them into compute. You have a bunch of companies in the software industry which just ten years ago used to be an industry of relatively few names in the overall ecosystem.
If you look toward the next ten years, almost every company is becoming a software company in some way.
Cybercriminals Have Recently Realized that Data is Money
Banks have been focused on security for longer because they’ve been the targets of fraud people have always gone after the money. You can argue that it’s a relatively recent focus area to realize that data’s money. That’s something that the internet companies realized 10 plus years ago and criminals have now realized that in the last five years, so that’s a change.
The other aspect of it is banks do innovate less. If you look at one of the biggest disruptions that are coming along now is the in the financial services sector and in the consumer financial services sector. I would argue that banks are having the other outcropping of that because they innovated a slower pace typically they are now being disrupted.