The future of hacking is decentralization — can blockchain spark innovation.
Security is a space that is built upon collaboration—antivirus companies study markets, work with ethical hackers and focus on specific points of network infrastructure to keep both companies and consumers secure.
This methodical process may have worked in the early days of the internet, but innovation in sectors such as IoT and mobile are creating unforeseen gaps, presenting additional targets for bad actors to exploit. Given the interconnected nature of technology in markets that rely on APIs, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and platform-based models, breaches that impact one company will have ripple effects into others. On the consumer side, people often use similar passwords between services.
Over time, bad actors have become more sophisticated and move faster than leaders in the security market can keep up. According to one study from the Identity Theft Resource Center and data risk management company CyberScout, the number of breaches in the United States alone jumped 29 percent in the first half of 2017. “Record highs” have become the new norm.
A two year joint research effort between the University of California at San Diego, the University of Twente in the Netherlands, and Saarland University in Germany, found that at any given time, a third of the internet experiences a DDoS attack—and this figure is likely an underestimate and poor predictor of future attacks that are growing at an exponential rate.
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