Published on the 13/04/2016 | Written by Clare Coulson

New Zealand is “over represented” when it comes to ransomware and social media scams, according to the latest security report from Symantec. And, what’s more, Symantec has noticed that the criminals are getting their corporate hats on, establishing professional businesses and adopting tried and tested corporate best practices in order to increase the efficiency of their attacks.

With news like this the natural reaction is to tighten perimeters and clamp down on risky behaviour, but that’s not how Matthew Gyde, Dimension Data’s security guy sees it. Speaking in relation to the launch of a new cybersecurity e-book, he says organisations are no longer simply reacting to cyber threats, but instead creating agile, adaptive IT infrastructures, and, in some cases, entire enterprises so that cyber breaches are addressed before they happen. For him “the future of cybersecurity is an enabler of innovation, and organisations need to shift away from fear-based to opportunity-based cybersecurity”.

But it’s not easy to feel the fear and do it anyway. According to Kevin Haley, director of Symantec security response, the most advanced criminal attack groups mirror the skill sets of nation-state attackers. Their staff – yes they have staff – are well-resourced and highly-skilled, have call centres and even take weekends and holidays off. Cybercrime has become a brazen and well-oiled machine.

New Zealand has increased in the global ranking across five out of six threat categories tracked by the Symantec report; spam, phishing hosts, bots, network attacking and web attacking countries. We also have the eighth highest proportion of global phishing traffic. Symantec estimates that data breaches were responsible for the loss of more than half a billion personal information records globally last year. Ransomware attacks have risen by 35 percent and have spread from the desktop to smartphones with New Zealand users becoming an increasingly popular target. And, nowadays you are just as likely to call your scammer in response to a fake warning message as they are to call you.

In a world where data sharing is the key to innovative solutions, such security concerns are inconvenient to say the least. This dichotomy is “forcing leaders to balance the risk and reward of new digital business value, with the cost of creating properly secured systems,” Gyde said. He foresees a future where Agile organisations are able to secure and selectively unlock and extrapolate data. Those organisation that do well at securing their data will also, according to him, be the organisations more likely to take on the daring innovations their competitors won’t risk. For many, however, those days are a far distant future, as they struggle to keep legacy systems stable and secure.