Cybersecurity Wars, Valuations and Your Data

Editor’s note: Investor and entrepreneur David Gardner is founder of Cofounders Capital in Cary?and is a regular contributor to WRAL TechWire.

Every month there are major cybersecurity breaches, data stolen and malware attacks. They happen so frequently now that even major breaches seem to go unnoticed by the public, but you would have to be living under a rock not to have heard about the CrowdStrike? outages last month. Although not caused by malware, it did demonstrate how utterly dependent we are on our computers and data. A single vendor’s software update brought numerous major companies and entire airlines to almost a full stop leaving millions of people stranded.

Why the increase in cyber crime

Just as the US economy has become a global economy, computers have become a global mashup of technologies and vendors. The PC I’m typing on now is really a collection of components made and maintained by dozens of hardware vendors, not to mention the software I’ve installed, browser plug-ins and online services I use. Every time I clicked an “Agree” button on a click-through agreement, I gave yet another company the right to access my computer and install any software of its choosing.

The problem of software updates

I consider myself a sophisticated technology user so I was very surprised and humbled a few months ago when ransomware managed to circumvent the hardware firewall in my home network and the software virus-protection on my laptop.

Suddenly, thousands of the digital pictures I had taken or scanned over the last 50 years were encrypted and I was being told to pay a ransom if I ever wanted to see them again. I have a network accessible storage (NAS) unit in my server rack that does continuous backups so I thought that I could reinstall copies of my photos from there but the backup photos were also compromised.

Later I learned that it was the manufacturer of my NAS unit itself that was to blame. It had been compromised allowing the malware to be added to its last software update. I literally invited the malware to walk right in through the door I left open for this vendor to maintain the software I purchased from it.

Being old school, a few times each year I make an offline backup of my NAS unit data to a portable drive I keep in a fireproof safe. Fortunately, this backup had not been infected, and I was able to restore nearly all my photos, but this incident illustrates just how vulnerable my data has become. Google, Seagate, Nvidia, Windows, Apple and a host of much smaller little-known vendors have a door straight into my data that must be left open if I want their hardware and software to continue to function properly.

An uncertain future

As a result of all of this, cyber security venture investing and valuations are soaring. Last month we saw the valuation of Wiz? jump from $12B to a $23B offer from Google to acquire the company which it turned down. Advances in AI have caused many noted experts in the industry to predict that once Quantum computers are ubiquitous and used for nefarious purposes, there literally will be no firewall that cannot be breached given a few days. Worse yet, those vendor firewalls represent a ready pathway for malware to infect hundreds of millions of computers through the open software update access they have been granted by customers.

Conclusion

Cyber warfare is an ongoing and ever-evolving arms race. One can only hope that there will be viable defenses against the dark arts to come but it is not inconceivable to envision a world where effective firewalls and data security is just an illusion. In such a near-future reality the only secure data might be that which is written on a piece of paper and placed in your wall safe. It is ironic to think that it might be our amazing advances in technology that catapult us back to a pre-computer existence.