By now, it is obvious to everyone that widespread remote working is accelerating the trend of digitization in society that has been happening for decades.

What takes longer for most people to identify are the derivative trends. One such trend is that increased reliance on online applications means that cybercrime is becoming even more lucrative. For many years now, online theft has vastly outstripped physical bank robberies. Willie Sutton said he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is.” If he applied that maxim even 10 years ago, he would definitely have become a cybercriminal, targeting the websites of banks, federal agencies, airlines, and retailers. According to the 2020 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, 86% of all data breaches were financially motivated. Today, with so much of society’s operations being online, cybercrime is the most common type of crime.

Unfortunately, society isn’t evolving as quickly as cybercriminals are. Most people think they are only at risk of being targeted if there is something special about them. This couldn’t be further from the truth: Cybercriminals today target everyone. What are people missing? Simply put: the scale of cybercrime is difficult to fathom. A report sponsored by the Herjavec Group estimates cybercrime will cost the world over $6 trillion annually by 2021, up from $3 trillion in 2015, but numbers that large can be a bit abstract.

A better way to understand the issue is this: In the future, nearly every piece of technology we use will be under constant attack – and this is already the case for every major website and mobile app we rely on.

Read the full article published September 6, 2020 here: https://venturebeat.com/2020/09/06/how-ai-will-automate-cybersecurity-in-the-post-covid-world/ by VentureBeat.