I.

Look at the words and word combinations in bold to make sure you know
them, as this will facilitate your understanding of the abstract.

A CYBERCRIME TSUNAMI
While it is true that violent crime has dropped precipitously in the developed world
over the past 2 decades, in fact there is a tsunami of criminal activity on the horizon.
It is in the form of cybercrime, and its impact on individual, corporate and national
security will be profound in 2023 and the years to come.
Today’s transnational organized-crime groups are technologically sophisticated, and
their business plans have a lot in common with global technology companies. Their
illicit enterprises employ the latest business-management strategies well before
they appear in the Harvard Business Review. Modern criminal start-ups are using
gamification techniques, as well as offering incentives such as sports cars to
hackers who invent the most profitable scams.

The future of cybercrime will be both automated and three-dimensional. Automated,

because the majority of online scams are no longer perpetrated directly by humans
but by crimeware – software specially scripted to carry out crime.
Cryptolocker, e.g., automates extortion by encrypting infected hard drives and
demanding ransoms in bitcoin for the safe return of a user’s data files.
The widespread arrival of crimeware has also democratized the hacking process,
opening computer crime to thieves with much lower levels of technological
sophistication than the previous generation of hackers.

And cybercrime is about to go 3D (enter the 3rd dimension – leaping into the world
that surrounds us). Physical objects, increasingly embedded with computer chips,
are becoming hosts of information technology. Televisions, cars, refrigerators,
smoke detectors and pacemakers now connect to the internet in a phenomenon
known as the internet of things (IOT).

The insecurity of IOT is troubling, as all objects around us morph into computer
code. Smart homes and smart grids sound like a great idea, until one realizes that the
computer code driving these is entirely hackable. And it’s not just bits and bytes
that get manipulated, but atoms too, allowing malicious people to manipulate objects
half a world away.

Cybercrime is growing extremely fast and will do so throughout 2023. A 2022

report by Juniper, a research consultancy, estimated that it will cost businesses 2
trillion dollars a year by 2025. Cisco, a technological company, predicts that 60
billion new devices will be connected to the internet by 2030, and almost all of them
insecurely. The McKinsey Global Institute predicts that by 2025 the IOT will
generate up to $11 trillion in value to global economy. According to Gartner, another
technology consultancy, businesses will have to invest nearly $120 billion on cyber-
security measures by 2024. This spending represents an indirect tax on businesses,
which will find themselves forced to bolster their own security defences in the
absence of any effective government response.

II. What assumptions are made regarding the following:

- how much will cybercrime cost businesses a year in the near future?
- how many new devices will be connected to the internet by 2030?
- how much will IOT generate in value to global economy in 2 years’
time/ by 2025?
- how much might businesses have to invest in cyber-security measures
next year?

COUNTER-AT-HACK

Though people’s growing dependence on the internet continues to give

attackers the upper hand, for those with the time, money and willpower
required, the ingredients of effective defense are falling into place. It is
becoming easier to identify attackers and the means they use, easier to foil and
deter them, and easier to repair the damage they do.

III. What could be done about this world-wide wave of cybercrime? How can
businesses fight back? Working in teams and using the following clues, work
up strategies of the most effective ways to fight cyber-crime.

Clues:
Ingredients of security: identity, virtualization, threat intelligence

Identity: passwords, logins, biometrics, posture, gait, typing habits, security

questions stop being wacky, numbers from codes generated by an app on the
phones, a triple lock.

Virtualization: run sessions off one big server, virtual sessions are easy to
monitor, up-to-date software, flag up and close down suspicious activity: snooping
around one’s network, browsing the internet, transferring info at odd hours.

Threat intelligence: attackers are vulnerable, defenders can turn the tables on
them: infiltrate chat rooms and marketplaces, honeypots, honeynets, identify
enemies, hire ex-spies.

IV. Agree or disagree:

Solid cyber-security is like is like a strong immune system. Good health plus
personal and public hygiene give it the best chance, but not invincibility.

Manual typewriters and carbon paper will be the must-have technology of the
future.