Vice-president of the cybersecurity company declared that requests for ransom of company information are on average R$25 million
The vice president of South America, Jeferson Propheta, stated that the company identifies around 50 attempted kidnappings and theft of company data per week globally. To the Poder360the executive reported that, on average, requests to rescue corporate information are around R$20 million to R$30 million.
According to Propheta, the profile of cyber attacks has changed over the last two decades and the digital criminal universe has transformed into a million-dollar market. Hackers have followed the evolution of companies’ digitalization processes and have implemented sophisticated techniques that have alerted companies and state bodies around the world.
In the 1980s and 1990s and early 2000s, the biggest concerns in the virtual environment were about viruses programmed to cause damage to electronic devices. Over the years, criminals became more sophisticated and began to use programs aimed at extorting information.
According to Propheta, these activities are also not limited to isolated agents or criminal groups. Several countries began to create a hostile culture in the virtual environment to steal sensitive information from other nations.
“Today, we realize that there is a malicious industry that is making a lot of money stealing information, having a technological advantage through these malicious artifacts. This evolution happened from the years 2002, 2003, where we began to notice even governments entering this technological universe with offensives in the digital universe to steal information, to position themselves, to have a better positioning against another geography, against another country, to be able to have leverage in the event of a conflict”said the Prophet.
Founded in the USA in 2011, Crowdstrike is one of the largest cybersecurity companies in the world. The executive said that the company has mapped 3 profiles of hackers, who tend to cause the greatest damage in the corporate world and global geopolitics:
- e-crime – hackers who steal data from companies or people to carry out so-called ransomware – an attack where digital assets are kidnapped and the company or person needs to pay a ransom to avoid a leak;
- hacktivistas – known for website deconfiguration attacks. Hacktivists try, in some way, to carry out cyber attacks to bring some ideology to light. They are generally nationalists or activists;
- state criminals – government entities, generally linked to the Department of Defense of some countries, that use cyber attacks to seek information that gives geopolitical advantages.
Among the 3 profiles, the one that worries Crowdstrike the most is e-crime, as it is a larger group and causes more lethal damage to companies. Propheta stated that criminals take advantage of companies with low digital maturity to steal files and carry out extortion. According to the executive, companies are willing to make the payment because they understand that this is an easy way to solve the problem, but the effect is the opposite.
“There is a very large movement of money, especially when we talk about extortion attacks, which come together with data theft, or data kidnapping itself. Many companies end up paying. This encourages crime and causes attackers to increasingly invest money in order to obtain a greater return.”declared the Prophet.
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NON-BRAZIL ENVIRONMENT
Regarding security in the digital environment in Brazil, Propheta declared that the country is not one of the most vulnerable to cyber attacks. But it is also not one of the most protected.
For the Crowdstrike executive, the country has a geopolitical position that for years has not raised major concerns regarding foreign policy. In recent years, however, Brazil has begun to develop an infrastructure that allows the installation of more sophisticated data protection programs.
“I think we improved a lot. It is not true to say that we are in the worst geographies, but we still have a lot to improve”, said the Prophet. “The great difficulty of cybersecurity today in our geography is having to run after an environment that was not prepared from the beginning. It is much more difficult, much more expensive and much more time-consuming to maintain an infrastructure that is already ready versus you think about this security”he declared.
