What is Cybercrime?
If you search “what is cybercrime?” on Google, you’ll get this:
“criminal activities carried out by means of computers or the internet”
But I believe cybercrime isn’t defined by the actual crime or means by which it was committed, but rather the wake it leaves behind it. Feelings of vulnerability, paranoia, and incredulousness with only you left to pick up the pieces. “Why me?” I remember feeling when I was hacked in September of 2021. Here I was, a Google engineer that had worked in cybersecurity. How the heck am I the one who got hacked? Turns out Hotmail had had a massive password leak (which they subsequently followed up with a big PR announcement around a “passwordless future”).
With the rise of technology also comes our increased dependency and trust around products and services we don’t necessarily control. We make these trade offs because of the value these products provide, but never fully understand the implications of our decisions.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s just how boundless human creative energy can be. When used for good, it creates many of the compounding improvements we see in today’s society. What happens when it’s used for bad? How does technology compound that?
Let’s take a look at the state of cybercrime in the US:
My immediate reactions when I first saw this were:
- “WOAH, there’s this many types of cybercrime?”
- “We lost THAT MUCH money last year?”
- “What even are half of these things?”
At the very least, I now knew I wasn’t alone. These issues have been pervasive for years, and steadily growing at a clip of ~80% year over year. Unfortunately, a lot of these crimes take the same technology that provides so much value in our daily lives, and turns it against us. Furthermore, many of these crimes happen across international borders, so restitution isn’t even possible (what, are you alone going to enact the FBI to go find some call center halfway across the world that scammed you out of tens of thousands of dollars?).
Take email account compromise (referred to as “EAC” above). For many, email is the core of their online identity. We connect it to our financial accounts, social media, and everything in between. We use it to do everything from sharing photos with loved ones to locking down the details of multi-billion dollar deals.
So what happens when it gets hacked?
In my case, the hacker was in my old high school email account for 2 whole weeks before I knew it and caused some serious damage to my financial accounts. The hacker managed to do this by setting up an email filter that sent all of my suspicious login notifications and banking 2-factor codes to trash.
In the case of the victims from Netflix’s “The Most Hated Man On The Internet”, their entire world was flipped upside down when some of their most intimate moments were posted bare for the world to see.
So how do we fix this?
We build.
We build with urgency, thoughtfulness, and compassion for the problem at hand.
At Kyber, we’re starting with cyber insurance, the core safety net that’s ready for whatever the internet throws your way.
