HackHack

TalkTalk’s hack dominated the news this month – 4 million customer records and banking details stolen is quite a story. This is bad news for TalkTalk and their customers of course but it’s only one of a long list of hacks involving vast quantities of personal information put into the hands of hackers.

It’s easy to be critical of TalkTalk for this incident – particularly as it isn’t their first – and I guess there’s an element of schadenfreude in the industry about it. But as I speak to other telcos, there is no smugness – we’re all under attack all the time these days and we know just how difficult it is to defend against.

If there was any doubt about this, the Office of National Statistics finally got round to counting crime against businesses last week, reporting that in the last 12 months there were an estimated 5.1 million incidents of fraud and 2.5m incidents of computer misuse – including 404,000 incidents of computer hacking – that are not as yet included in UK crime statistics.

These are findings that, when eventually included, will reverse the current downward trend in ‘traditional’ crime since the mid 1990s, described as a “triumph” by politicians and police alike. Meanwhile, cybercrime against business is growing quickly in both scope and harm:

“The cyber threat remains one of the most significant – and growing – risks facing UK business. 81% of large businesses and 60% of small businesses suffered a cyber security breach in the last year, and the average cost of breaches to business has nearly doubled since 2013.” (HMG/Marsh 2015)

Now that’s an amazing statistic, 81% of large and 60% of small businesses have been breached in a year. That really means that every business has been or will be hacked in some way in a couple of years. If that was street robbery or burglary, there’d be riots.

I’m not sure what can be done about this; the Internet of Things is coming and is going to be far bigger than the Internet of people. It seems to me that things can only get worse – much worse.