Cyberattack: should you make the headlines or pay the ransom? Is there another solution?
The year 2021 has been historic in terms of hacking and ransomware. Digital data is booming. The importance of a digital safe is growing!
In a report in October this year, RTS announced that hackers had probably succeeded in stealing the names of 130,000 companies applying for a Covid-19 credit in 2020. The EasyGov platform, used today by over 40,000 SMEs, which contained the information of these 130,000 companies, had been hacked a few months before the RTS report.
Also in the spotlight this year: the hacking of the data of over 5,000 taxpayers in the commune of Rolle. The announcement was widely reported in the media following anarticle in Le Temps which claimed that employee appraisal reports and tax exemption applications from residents of the Vaud municipality were accessible on the Darknet.
A few weeks later, the commune of Montreux also announced that it had been the victim of a cyber attack. In December, the news thatAlain Berset 's personal data had beenposted on the Darknet made headlines, as did the recent discovery of Log4Shell, a large-scale security flaw already present in millions of systems.
Targets include SECO, EMS, Comparis, Baselworld, Art Basel, MCH Group, Fondation le Relais, Fribourg wholesaler CultureFood and Mediamarkt. A recent debate on RTS between various specialists, including Lennig Pedron, Executive Director of Trust Valley, focused on the subject of ransomware from cyberattacks.
But institutions and businesses are by no means the only ones to bear the brunt of cybercriminals and their "malware", whose frequency of distribution and numbers are intensifying. In October, the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC ) counted more than 315 malware announcements in a single week, compared with the usual few.
These intrusions are not simply a passing fad, a series of events of decreasing frequency. As the amount of digital data continues to grow, digital information hacking has a bright future ahead of it. Let's put this expansion into perspective.
In 2018, 90% of all data accessible on the Internet had been generated in the previous two years alone. In 2014, there were 2.4 billion of us using the internet, compared with 4.4 billion five years later, an increase of 83%. Every day, 306 billion e-mails are sent and 500 million Tweets generated. In 2020, 2.5 trillion bytes were generated every day. For your information, a trillion is a number followed by eighteen zeros. Every second, a single Internet user generates 1.7 MB of data. By way of comparison, the hundred-page PDF of the Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation is 0.4 MB in size.
Our data, digital oil for the GAFAMs, is not going to dry up. Quite the contrary! With the rise of cross-industry digitization, and the advent of increasingly immersive technologies and platforms such as the metavers being developed by web giants and gaming companies, the amount of data will intensify. And as data expands, so does the importance of securing the most sensitive and important data.
With this in mind, Swiss Blockchain specialist Wecan Group intends to respond to this. The company has already developed Wecan Comply, a digital safe enabling the exchange of information between thirteen Banks and sixty independent asset managers, and is currently working on Wecan Act, the digital safe for notaries. These two safes are essential to the creation of a universal digital safe for the secure storage of our digital data.
Like the physical version found in a bank, the digital safe would be a space where the owner has total control over what is stored there. Users themselves, or through third-party stakeholders (public services, town hall, bank, tax authorities, etc.), would provide the information stored in their safe. In a move to reappropriate their data, citizens could then monetize it themselves by granting access to third-party companies or applications in return for payment.
Digital alienation is set to increase with the rise of the metaverse. The announcements of Facebook's name change, coupled with the gaming giants' massive investments in the sector, confirm this point. Disney has also announced that it is studying this field for entertainment, as has Microsoft, which has informed us that it intends to bring more immersive functionalities to its Teams videoconferencing solution.
The use of data will be increasingly valuable, and the owner of the data should have control over it, steering its use from a secure space where he or she can be the only master on board. This is one of the best ways of avoiding the "pay a ransom or make the news" dilemma.
