Since the year 2020, many businesses and people and moved to digitalisation which has increased the amount of valuable data online. From that time, there are two wars that are being fought, one is against the COVID-19 pandemic and the second is against digital pandemic due to intensified cyberattacks. The number are shockingly high if put together even on a monthly basis.
According to Forbes, there were 436 breaches alone in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in the year 2020 affecting 17.3 million innocent people with 31 breaches in January alone. Medical records are worth $1000 each in the Dark Web making it the most wanted target.
In United Kingdom, in February 2021, the breaches have set a new record as 2,323,326,953 documentations were breached in total through a ransomware attack against a cloud service provider. The month was marked as the worst one in terms of cyber-attacks.
Not only this, eight people got arrested in Europe for phishing goods worth $2.4 million where innocent victims thought they were buying goods and services from eBay, Amazon and Airbnb.
While checking the statistics, it is clear that the data available online needs to be protected as the rate of cybercrime is increasing by 8.1%. When it comes to the year 2021, following are the predictions on how the cybersecurity is going to evolve:
Enterprises are going to increase their cybersecurity budgets and hire full time cyber staff to avoid such breaches. While many are thinking to increase their budget, the majority is still in dilemma. The pressure on cybersecurity is increasing day by day as the criminals are becoming cleverer than ever. The opportunities for these hackers are fuelled up as several businesses are opting to be digitalized.
The industry of cybersecurity spending is predicted to have three main hotspots in the year 2021, which are, Identity and Access Management, message and network security.
New and top-notch technologies like Cloud Workload Protection Platform, Password less authentication, and cloud security posture management will be introduced to promote cybersecurity. They are estimated to show their effects in one to three years.
There are predictions that security services will be the fastest and largest growing fragment of this industry due to its growing demand. Followed by it will be the software division all because of digitalization amongst old and new businesses.
With advancements in the security market, there will be steeping increase in cybercrimes like phishing, data breach, endpoint security attacks and privilege access credential abuse, resulting in growth of cybersecurity software market to $230 Billion by the end of the year 2021.
The rise in breaches in health department in the year 2020 was seen due to high rates of medical records in the Dark Web, whereas, in the year 2021, authorities have predicted that intellectual properties will be the next hot target of hackers. These intellectual properties include vaccine research as they are in high demand due to the pandemic. When the countries all around the globe were fighting to be the first to launch vaccine against covid-19, it was predicted that hackers or insiders may launch it first on the Dark Web for hundreds and thousands of dollars.
It is predicted that many Small & Medium Businesses (SMB) will be spending on cybersecurity, including hardware, software and services, as even they will not be spared by hackers. This will make it an $80 billion market in four years. This will also change the working habits developed due to covid-19 drastically in respect to data handling.
Enterprise cybersecurity will beat the four key industries, namely, banking and finance, healthcare, media and telecom and social sectors in terms of rate of growth in spending. This data is currently predicted for the large-scale enterprises only, however, in Small and Medium Businesses, the growth will also quickly bounce back.
