Global internet security market estimated at over $95bn annually

… as cyber crime values $1trn

Global internet security market has been esti- mated at about $95 billion with a compound Growth Rate CAGR of 8.4 percent be- tween 2015 and 2018, Den Sullivan, Cisco’s head of architecture and engineer- ing for emerging markets, has said.

Though Sullivan, who spoke on internet security at One Africa Partner Sum- mit organised by Cisco in Limpopo, South Africa, be- lieves that the figures are underestimated, but says it is believed that the growing security market is equally informed by growing cyber crime, calculating global an- nual cyber crime at between $450 billion and $1 trillion.

According to him, hack- ing has become a big indus- try, and “I think the termindustrialisation is the per- fect description for what is going on in the market. It connotes the mechanisa- tion, the sophistication of a highly organised adversary.

“I think the figure of $95 billion estimated security market falls far short of the true opportunity, but it is a market where Cisco is truly going big. We have hired over 1,000 engineers in this field in the last few months and we are still hiring more engineers.”

Sullivan identified the ac- tors in the hacking business as nation states, hacktivists and cyber criminals, noting that though every country in the world was developing offensive cyber capabilities, but the focus of the hackers were government to govern- ment, as “there are some countries who are hacking industry.”

Hacktivists are anony- mous groups who use theirsocial and political agenda as the motivation for their hacking, while cyber crimi- nals have achieved some level of sophistication that is unparalleled in history.

“They have software de- velopment and quality teams, they own every piece of secu- rity software on the market and develop very effective evasion techniques to exploit vulnerabilities,” he said.

Sullivan, who is respon- sible for helping custom- ers in 84 countries align their business priorities with their IT strategies, said “all of these adversaries are well financed, intelligent, so- phisticated and very moti- vated… this is what we are up against.”

Back in the 90s, attacks were very simple – virus’ and worms, and web defac- ing, but today, the attackers have been increasing their sophistication, to the extent that our customers are fac-ing apts or the advanced persistent threats… these are very targeted threats.

Sullivan was confident that as the adversary is trans- forming, Cisco, the internet and infrastructure solutions firm, is equally transforming to stay ahead of the hackers.

“That is why we launched the new Cisco security,” he said.

According to him, as a networking company, Cisco has had vast experience with security, but sees the com- pany playing more crucial role in the future.

“Cisco, for example, monitors 150 million end- points each day; its networks handle 95 billion e-mails every day, and it also has 13 billion Web requests daily.

From that information, and using our analytics and the capacity of the engineers we have, we can see what attack vectors are emerging and very quickly protect our customers,” he said.

DANIEL OBI in South Africa