The pandemic has turned the job, moving it into homes, and many businesses have moved their IT infrastructure to the cloud as a result. This has increased the complexity of an approach more holistic to protection against cyber attacks. A recent analysis by Acronis, a company active in protecting against cyber attacks, highlighted how the 62% of companies have more than 5 security solutions, while 21% have more than 10.
On the other hand, there has been an increase in cyber attacks, with more and more automations being used to create beyond 600,000 new malware every day. This brings to attention how important it is to have an efficient and automated process for responding to attacks.
In his report, theAcronis Cyberthreats Report 2020, the company reports that in 2020 beyond 1.000 companies suffered data theft following a ransomware attack, while the 31% of companies worldwide reported a cyber attack of any kind every day.
Acronis specializes in data protection for sports clubs of all kinds, and in recent years has formalized partnerships with major football clubs such as AS Roma, FC Inter, Liverpool FC e AFC Ajax. Sports clubs may not seem like targets for cybercriminals, but they hold a large amount of sensitive data and behind it is a multi-billion dollar industry. For this reason, they too are fighting the wave of cyberattacks like any other company.
“We’ve seen phishing attacks and business email compromise campaigns trying to get internal data and profit from it. Last year an English club had almost lost around £ 1 million when such an attack tried to redirect the money required to pay for a player’s transfer. ‘ comments Jan-Jaap Jager, Board Advisor e responsabile #CyberFit Sport in Acronis.
“There have also been classic attacks, such as ransomware ones, which could block all activity, for example by disrupting turnstiles at the entrance to a stadium. Such an attack would be very onerous in conditions where time is a critical variable, such as on the day of a tournament final. “
Other types of attacks are data breaches, with the aim of stealing fan data and player personal information in order to publish them or to extort money from clubs. This type of data is usually stolen from ticketing sites and can therefore contain sensitive information such as credit card numbers used to purchase tickets, which is very profitable for cybercriminals.
Artificial intelligence and, more specifically, machine learning, are used to find anomalies in large amounts of data in near real time. This could be useful for analyzing large datasets to try to improve or make the overall infrastructure more efficient, such as analyzing customer flows in stadiums or player performance.
Cyber attacks occur by industry and location of business, but there is no clear correlation between attack types, number of attacks and type of sport: cybercriminals don’t distinguish between sports, they go where they know they are causing most damage possible or extort as much money as possible.