The Economics of Cyber-Attacks
How to Provide State of the Art Protection against Real World Threats
We live in a world where increasing numbers of complex cyber breach tools are available on the Darknet. But what is the Darknet and how do we protect against it? The Darknet is an anonymous and obfuscated section of the internet where criminals can exchange information, tools and money to carry out attacks with little or no traceability. The Darknet provides a service marketplace where criminals can do many of the same things that law-abiding citizens do every day. Criminals search the internet (anonymously). They exchange emails with other criminals and prospective customers, they read news on the latest opensource tools available to perform effective attacks. They even have an online marketplace where cyber-attack services can be ordered and placed into your online shopping cart. In fact, a Darknet marketplace recently advertised $7,500 to rent the now notorious Mirai botnet – the same botnet used to generate a several hundred gigabit multi-vector attack that took down the services of Amazon, BBC, HBO, Netflix, PayPal, Spotify, and many others in October 2016.
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In this increasingly sophisticated cyber-attack landscape, over half of all businesses feel that they could not protect against such an attack. This leaves a significant business opportunity for savvy internet service providers, telco providers, and Cable companies/MSOs to provide a high value security service based on state-of-the-art tools and procedures to combat the most destructive attacks known today.
Best of all, this service can be based in two forms: first, as a do-it-yourself, build-and-operate service security or second, as a white-labeled service from an existing managed security provider – the latter being an increasingly popular offering. The white label strategy has several immediate advantages. Most importantly, it offers the quickest time-to-market method for service providers to close the hole in their IT security strategy and begin to offer this critical service to their enterprise customers. Next, it lowers risk by utilizing a NO CAPEX revenue share model to provide share success collaboration with the cloud service. Lastly, it leverages best-of-breed automation tools and proven security expertise to mitigate the most difficult attacks in real time, with no service impact to you or your customers.
