A Corporate Specialist from Allianz Global in South Africa, Nobuhle Nkosi, has said cybercrime is likely to increase by about 17 million cases by 2020.
She said this at a seminar at the Labadi beach hotel on Wednesday, October 25, meant to educate companies and individuals who use the internet as a major tool for business.
“Cyber predictions for 2018 and beyond DDoS attacks will increase to 17million by 2020.Data breaches are also expected to grow by 40% a year by 2019” she predicted.
“The number and complicity of cyber-attacks is on the rise and are becoming more and more sophisticated by the day. We have found that digital crime is a growing dimension of crime, and the reason for this is because criminals have the enormity, they can hide behind the dark web and not be seen and operate from anywhere in the world and have a wide reach of targets, working from their homes”
There are 556 million cybercrime victims a year which equates to more than 1.5million per day and 18 victims per second.
The Commissioner of Insurance at the company, who also graced the occasion, stated that cyber-crime has been persistent but under-reported by victims who fear they might lose their businesses.
“The issue of cybercrime has been something that has been going on for quite some time now. We have had instances where banks have been hit by hackers or fraudsters but unfortunately they cannot come out to say what is happening because every is afraid that if you come and tell the whole that this is what has happened to me people would get scared and take their money out of you bank,” he noted.
Mr. Chark Uekermann of Aves Cyber Security, who gave a presentation on cybercrime and how it works stated cybercriminals are difficult to find, because of the nature of the crimes they operate.
“Cybercrime is probably one of the most difficult things because when you see a physical criminal the police can I identify and arrest him. Has any of you seen a cyber-criminal before? And that’s the problem, you can’t see them,” Mr Chan explained.
“Now cybercriminals coming into our country do you monitor them? You can’t, because they came through zeros and ones, they come through our networks, and that’s the problem because we can’t see them. On average there are five new viruses launched every sec of the day.” he added.
He further advised internet users to exercise the utmost caution in order to ensure that they do not become victims of cyber-crime while using software on their phones or computers.
“Those nuisances updates you get on your operating systems don’t undo those, they are critical because the vendors have identified certain loopholes in the software and they are actually trying to patch it for you, we call it patches. Make sure you do those updates and obviously backup your data” he urged.
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By: Ann-Shirley Ziwu/citifmonile.com/Ghana