How Crowdsourcing is Tackling Cybercrime
Cybercrime is on the increase as crooked individuals and outfits are wreaking ever more havoc and costing companies billions of dollars every year.
The news is often filled with stories of corporate America coming under cyber-attack which is proof that even the most sophisticated sites are not immune. Alarm bells are ringing loudly.
An article by Paul McDougall in CruxialCIO highlights a number of instances where companies have turned to crowdsourcing to bolster their defenses.
The piece starts with an eyebrow-raising statistic courtesy of the 2013 Cost of Cyber Crime Study by the Ponemon Institute: corporate America spends about $11.6 million per firm per year on security experts and software.
Anything that can reduce that cost whilst improving security is to be welcomed.
Crowdsourced Security Examples
The article then goes on to outline a number of examples of where companies have enlisted the help of the crowd to help foil cyber criminals. They include:
Facebook – the social media behemoth’s bug bounty program will compensate anyone who finds a previously unreported security bug.
Microsoft – recently paid $100,000 to a security researcher who developed a program that would make users’ data vulnerable to hackers. This was part of the company’s Mitigation Bypass Bounty and BlueHat Bonus for Defense, an initiative that seeks hacks into its software from security professionals.
Hewlett-Packard – HP has developed Threat Central, a platform where organizations can share threat intelligence ‘securely, confidentially and in real-time’. The hope is that this will detect attacks faster and more accurately.
To read the full article, click here.
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