Cyberattacks cost at least $6,000 per day to the global economy
At nearly $6 billion a day are the losses that cyber incidents, or cyber attacks, cost the global economy. attempted attacks over the network are causing damage to the global economy. The data comes from Israel’s Computer Emergency Response Center (CERT), which is considered to be the country’s intelligence center.
“Cyber attacks cost companies around the world”. about $6 billion a day“, says CERT executive director Erez Tidhar, who also stresses that 80% of such attacks worldwide could be mitigated by upgrading national cyberspace defense systems.
Israel’s cyber capital
At a time when Israel is experiencing numerous protests against the reform of the judiciary. proposed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, quiet and stillness is the norm in the Beersheba technology park in the Negev desert.
This city, located in the south of the country and at a distance of just over 100 kilometers from Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, is considered “the cyber capital of Israel.” It is home to the CERT as well as other state agencies and national and international companies, active in the cyberspace protection.
This body receives hundreds of reports daily of attacks or attempted attacks occurring locally and internationally. Israel is the second most targeted country in the world after the United States, and also one of those that has developed this flourishing industry the most, which in 2021 attracted $8.8 billion in capital, according to data from the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
In the room that houses the unit of cyber attack surveillance in Israel and the rest of the world, the screens show a flurry of activity.
Particularly the one showing data collected by the Israeli company Checkpoint, which specializes in the protection of corporate networks of the most sophisticated cyber attacks around the globe.
In that CERT room, where access with any type of electronic device is prohibited, screens are displayed with a tally of the number of cyber attacks suffered on any given day in the world and practically to the second.
At 12:25 a.m. on a day this week a map of the five continents shows that at that time there are already more than 19.7 million cyber incidents. that have occurred. Ten minutes later they exceed 20.4 million.
Mongolia, Georgia, Chile, Nepal, and Indonesia were, for example, the countries that. most such incidents suffered from this past Sunday. These attacks or attempted attacks originated from anywhere in the world.
No country safe from cyber attacks.
Many of them from the United States to Israel, Spain, Poland, Nicaragua, Italy or Turkey, but also from those countries to others around them or on any continent. No country is safe.
According to these data the main sectors attacked were those of. education, health and governments.The same applies on a daily basis to infrastructure, finance, energy, water and telecommunications, which are considered essential infrastructures of a country.
A 2022 Israeli study of 20,000 reports of cyber-attacks or attempted cyber-attacks, 9,108 were cybersecurity incidents.according to CERT.
Most of the alerts are “phishing” or. data theft by sending e-mails (31 %), attacks on social networks (26 %), malware (18 %), vulnerabilities (12 %) or intrusions (7 %).
“Cybersecurity costs a lot of money, it’s true, but you have to invest in it. An attack, for example, targeting a company’s parent company can affect the entire business conglomerate and not allow it to operate for days or weeks,” Tidhar notes.
Rami Efrati, a retired former general and security expert in the mission-critical infrastructure sector and the industrial internet of things, asserts that “no one is immune. You have to protect yourself from cyber-attacks to protect your assets. If someone thinks he can do it alone, he is making a mistake.
The Israeli authorities have implemented what is known as a “security ecosystem” of the country, a structure that brings together innovation, education, public-private business collaboration and the capitalization of state spending on this defense.
For Cyber 7’s executive director, Daniel Martin, “governments cannot tackle cybersecurity defense alone, and it is not enough. It is also necessary to the private sector“.
