A cyber tidal wave:
Why the battleground has to shift.
The ever increasing volume of cyber attacks from around the globe, combined with their growing sophistication, is having an exponential impact on the cost of cybersecurity.
The cost of cybersecurity worldwide topped US$6 trillion in 2021 or US$16.4 Billion a Day.
More businesses and institutions have been forced to buy cybersecurity insurance with premiums doubling because of the incidence of attacks and costly payouts.
The increasing incidences of employees working from home, as well as BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) has led to more data breaches and weakened the defences of organisations against cybercrime.
It is important to appreciate that any business great or small is vulnerable. If you have data and/or assets, you are a target.
Businesses must understand that cybercrime is not an IT issue but a financial issue, and should act accordingly. The average cost of a data breach is US$4 million. It demands a business-wide strategy that includes employee awareness and training.
Failing to constantly back-up data and systems leaves them vulnerable to ransomware attacks. This is when an attacker demands a “ransom” in exchange for the decryption of a company’s data.
Organisations are chasing their tails, spending a lot of money on solutions that inevitably fail against the unrepentant determination of cybercriminals, who are ahead of the game.
Global Cybercrime Damage Costs:
- $6 Trillion USD a Year.
- $500 Billion a Month.
- $115.4 Billion a Week.
- $16.4 Billion a Day.
- $684.9 Million an Hour.
- $11.4 Million a Minute.
- $190,000 a Second.
Dealing with DDoS
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks rose in frequency by nearly a third in 2021 and climbed 75% in the fourth quarter, compared to the previous three months.
The big spike was due largely to rising online traffic as more people worked from home because of the pandemic.
Some of the world’s biggest companies have fallen victim to DDoS attacks.
Amazon suffered one of the largest publicly-disclosed DDoS attacks ever in February 2020, while in October 2020 Google admitted to a similar attack against its servers in September 2017, describing a foreign source which slowly ramped up its threat over a period of six months.
Blockchain cyber security
Blockchain is the key to winning the war against cybercrime.
It works because it honours the triad model of the CIA – confidentiality, integrity and availability of data at all times.
It does this by using a distributed ledger which records all transactions and data identically and simultaneously across multiple locations.
That data is time and date-stamped and is immutable.
No third party can access the blockchain without leaving their footprint.
Businesses are already employing blockchain to benefit from greater efficiency, opening the door to an entirely new way of business and competitive advantage.
The moat around your castle
Decentralisation
Blockchain’s greatest strength is its decentralised nature.
Traditional systems remain vulnerable because they can be attacked via a single point of entry.
Blockchain is resilient to such attacks because its assets, applications and security infrastructure are decentralised, instead using a consensus-driven, trustless approach.
In essence, it turns the tables on hackers by essentially turning their own weapons against them.
Confidentiality
Fully encrypted data in the blockchain protects it from being accessed by unauthorised parties when operating in untrusted networks.
Access controls should be implemented at the application level to prevent attacks from within the network.
Public key infrastructure with advanced security measures can authenticate parties and encrypt communication, while it is recommended that private keys should be protected by key management protocols to prevent the risk of theft in secondary storage.
Integrity
Data integrity is maintained through blockchain’s fundamental features of immutability and traceability.
Once entered on the blockchain, it cannot be altered or deleted.
Consensus model protocols offer a further layer of data security because 51% of users in public and private blockchains must agree to a transaction before it is validated.
Businesses can further guard against ledger splitting in the event of a 51% cyber control attack by monitoring nodes with increased activity.
Smart contracts can prevent miners from mining blocks of data by verifying and enforcing rules between parties.
Availability
Blockchains are extremely resilient.
They have no single point of failure making them much less susceptible to DDoS attacks due largely to the extreme expense of trying to overpower them.
Even under attack, data in the blockchain remains available with full copies of the ledger able to be accessed at all times across multiple nodes.
To date, blockchain’s most famous platform, Bitcoin, has never been hacked.
Safe data transfers
The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) in blockchain maintains authentication during data transfers. Smart contracts help with the automatic execution of agreements between two parties during a transfer.
Which industries
need blockchain cybersecurity?
Blockchain cybersecurity will soon become essential for most organizations, but for some industries the time is now.
Finance
Data immutability and transaction transparency are the main value drivers for the finance sector. The security of the tamper-proof immutable records on the blockchain compared tp traditional digital or paper records is a massive improvement of security. It also allows the use of ‘zero-knowledge proofs’, a verification process that limits the exposure of customer information, but gives confidence to the requester. And using smart contracts for execution once a condition has been met removes the opportunity for fraud.
Healthcare
Medical data sharing and associated security is a key concern for healthcare organisations. The cost of theft and data loss, both financial and personal, is huge. There is an increasing need for data to be shared across multiple parties, including IoT devices that monitor patient health. The safe protection of data, and only exposing data that is authorised to be shared, is a key benefit blockchain can bring.
Real Estate
Safe data storage is a key for the real estate industry. A lot of data is held in a variety of places or in centralised databases, while key processes can be automated including validating real estate ownership and transferring funds. Smart contracts can also be used to ensure a fast, secure and fully automated execution of real estate transactions between contracting parties.
Supply chain
Many industries are embracing blockchain for supply chain, because it provides a transparent, fully reliable view of any material that was needed to build a product and ensures full traceability. All the records are tamper-proof and immutable, therefore at any point in time data can be made transparent when needed. It allows companies to use this data to authenticate assets and proof that an asset authenticity is guaranteed.
Government
Today many government processes lack transparency, often because of the use of centralised databases where information can be altered. When you consider things like election results, the ramifications are enormous. Blockchain also increases transparency on how tax funds are being used, making this information publicly available, which will reduce fraud and increase accountability.
Partner with rewired.one
to harness the power of blockchain cybersecurity.
Create a virtually impenetrable wall between a bad actor and your enterprise.
Our Rewired.Networks product establishes and installs private blockchain networks as needed, while our Rewired.Ingestor solution takes data from third party elements and inserts them into the blockchain, safely and securely.
Rewired.one also provides custom solutions for bespoke blockchain cybersecurity needs.
Password-less entry
Using biometrics, blockchain creates a single unhackable point of entry into any private data.
Decentralised storage
Your data is everywhere and tamperproof, with no point of failure. Access is guaranteed to thwart ransomware attacks.
Secure everything
Secure IoT devices, corporate devices, robotics and backup systems as well as any other critical and privileged systems.
How to develop and launch blockchain Rewired Cybersecurity solutions:
- Book a free consultation with us to identify your data security needs.
- We clarify and confirm your requirements.
- We provide a proposal that integrates Rewired Cybersecurity with any of your existing systems.
- Our team provides support for your business case development for funding.
- We deploy Rewired Cybersecurity alongside your existing systems.
- We integrate at-risk data onto your enterprise blockchain.
- We secure your data access points with biometrics.
- Finally, we help you to innovate and continue to search for vulnerabilities.
What our clients say about us
For more than a year we have partnered with Rewired.one. They have consistently delivered great people that have given us great outcomes. We highly recommend them to augment your engineers and provide sound project management.
I’m grateful that we get to partner with Rewired.one early. It saved us from a lot of what could have been disaster by just following the flow. They provided foresight to not just do what’s trending now, but to see the implications of a decision. They answered the question, what’s the implications of this plan? And, what’s it going to mean five years down the road? Companies that work with rewired.one, will be set up, not just for short-term success, but to be sustainable and protected in the future.
Rewired.one helped us to retain knowledge internally with our engineering teams and get stakeholders buy-in for enterprise blockchain solutions by providing expert blockchain engineers and consultants to train us. Rewired.one really understand the benefits of blockchain in the enterprise and successfully delivered our proof of concept.