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How to Resist Cyber Crime and an Internet of Threats

The presence of cybercriminal activity online is an everyday challenge within the enterprise finance sector. Cybercrime is now an established threat to corporations and their customers. It's largely due to IT security policies that are difficult to enforce and the under-utilization of effective encryption.

Coupled with the challenges of cybercrime, financial service institutions now experience business model disruption from innovative Fintech start-ups and increasing regulatory oversight from legislation such as the Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2).

IT Security Market Development

It's in this atmosphere that financial sector leaders must make informed decisions on where to focus their IT budget to achieve security resilience. The Return on Investment (ROI) for an IT security project is not an easy calculation -- knowledge and experience are crucial in making those decisions.

The bottom line is the traditional financial sector must apply best-fit cybersecurity measures to obtain a competitive edge, such that the organization moves from being disrupted to being the disrupter. Moreover, all sensitive data assets must reside in high-performance computing systems that inherently apply superior encryption technology in both hardware and software.



According to the latest worldwide market study by Juniper Research, the cost of data breaches will rise from $3 trillion each year to over $5 trillion in 2024 -- that's an average annual growth rate of 11 percent.

This will primarily be driven by increasing fines for data breaches as regulation tightens, as well as a greater proportion of commerce lost as enterprises become more dependent upon digital business transformation and related eCommerce.

The new study uncovered that while the cost per breach will steadily rise in the future, the levels of data disclosed will make headlines but not impact breach costs directly, as most fines and lost business are not directly related to breach sizes.

Cybercrime is increasingly sophisticated. Juniper analysts anticipate that more cybercriminals will use artificial intelligence (AI) which will learn the behavior of security systems in a similar way to how cybersecurity firms currently employ the technology to detect abnormal behavior.

The global market research also highlights that the evolution of deep fakes and other AI-based techniques is also likely to play a part in social media cybercrime in the future.

In spite of cybersecurity becoming increasingly part of corporate culture, it is not necessarily gaining traction with system users. As a result, Juniper Research expects that security awareness training will become an increasingly important part of enterprise cybersecurity practice.

Outlook for Employee Training and Data Encryption

The gains that can be made by increasing employee awareness of the evolving landscape of cyber threats can make more efficient use of cybersecurity-related IT spending, which Juniper Research expects to rise by only 8 percent per year.

That said, the automated encryption of sensitive data is the ultimate guard against employee-generated security risks. People are unpredictable, encryption is certain.

"All businesses need to be aware of the holistic nature of cybercrime and, in turn, act holistically in their mitigation attempts," said Susan Morrow, an analyst at Juniper Research. "As social engineering continues unabated, the use of human-centric security tactics needs to take hold in enterprise security."

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