Global Costs of Cybercrime and Cybersecurity and the Setbacks to Crypto Adoption
Weeks ago, I tried to share with a senior friend the reason he could embrace cryptocurrency. It all started fro, when I suggested the he checks out a blockchain system to manage his financial business/programme for safety and many more Benefits. After several minutes of giving a convincing talk, all I got in response was that he's scared of hacks. In his words "Assume that I held $50,000 of my life savings in cryptocurrency and in one day, everything disappears into the wallet of an anonymous hacker and I lose all my saving" He said, he wouldn't face such. His strong point was the recent Twitter hack which funds where whisked from anxious money doublers to bitcoin wallets.
You see how people defy the numerous benefits that are lurking in blockchain tech and cryptocurrency and holding just one asserted "flaw" of anonymous activities. I may not tell how many persons also have such erroneous thoughts about blockchain and cryptocurrency and this may tend to delay mass adoption of especially from the African sect which is indeed a strong market.
Cybercrime covers all illegal activity which aims to compromise the integrity of computer systems or which is designed to manipulate, illegitimately access, or compromise electronic data.source The term also refers to the deliberate use of computer networks to advance criminal causes. Bitcoin had been accused to have enghanced this course over the years.
Cybercrime is on the rise and with the way it goes, does not appear to be going down anytime soon, what with the advent of such technologies as: artificial intelligence, Big Data, and cloud computing. In the last few weeks, a few Africans have been inveolved in Cyber crime scandals. Moreover, cybercrime is easy and largely rewarding; and with the growing number of devices connected to the internet, there are high tendencies for increase in cybercriminal activities.
A research reports has it that a low-risk, high-yield activity, cybercrime is "one of the biggest challenges that humanity will face in the next two decades."
According to Cybersecurity Ventures, cybercrime "will cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021, up from $3 trillion in 2015. This represents the greatest transfer of economic wealth in history... and will be more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined."source Alongside the rest of the world, Nigeria is also caught in the crosshairs: her economy continues to bleed from the spree of cyberattacks and breaches—last year alone, phishing attacks, ransomware, and malicious software embedded at payment interfaces cost Nigerian companies billions of Naira.[9]
With today's increased sophistication in technology and stricter data protection regulations, "the cybersecurity market is likely to grow from USD 152.71 billion in 2018 to USD 248.26 billion by 2023, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 10.2% during 2018–2023," and Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that "global spending on cybersecurity products and services will exceed $1 trillion cumulatively over the next five years, from 2017 to 2021."source
With such projections that were made few years ago and are turning out to be true, what is the future of blockchain tech and cryptocurrency? Now that the "corrupt" banks are getting interested in cryptocurrency, where are we headed? Currently, it would cost quite so much from finances to reputation, and skills to setup anti-hack tools in blockchains. What about ethical hacking that is new tech skills-need area invoke?
I am bothered about the future of cryptocurrencies. We may have been so excited about the surge in value and prices, what about the sustainability of the system?
Posted Using LeoFinance