Rebooting the internet for the cybercrime age

One of the things I most enjoy about what I do now is getting the opportunity to dig deeper into areas that really catch my interest. And the internet is high on the priority list, as some of you will know from?previous posts. We’re 30+ years down the line since the World Wide Web came into being, and a lot has changed in that time, to put it mildly. I’ve moved company and country a few times, seen my kids grow up, and lost some hair for a start. Meanwhile, technology has been ramping up faster and faster, and new ways of doing just about everything online have become possible.

Yet the internet is still operating on some of its original protocols, including BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol, which routes the information we send whizzing back and forth between our own devices, corporate systems, and unknown bits of equipment sitting out there in cyberspace. The problem with this is that it generally selects a routing path based on the fewest “hops” between entities or domains, and doesn’t take into account how long that path is, which physical, geographical or political boundaries it crosses, or any performance issues along the way. And because the internet was designed with openness and sharing in mind, it means there are gaps that cybercriminals can breach all too easily.

Connectivity needs are growing all the time, and I can’t foresee a time in the near future when this trend is going to reverse. To give you a few statistics, in Europe alone there will be over 475 million unique mobile subscribers this year, according to the?GSMA. Not only that, but there will be 450 million mobile internet subscribers by 2025, and as we add more machines into the equation, the number of IoT connections will reach 4.3 billion the same year. By 2026, mobile data will have quadrupled. That’s a lot of internet traffic.

And of course, as more of us move to hybrid and remote working models, those projections will only grow again. An article in?Forbes?reports that 72% of executives say their organizations have started adopting permanent remote-working models, while a similar percentage of employees (70%) now count working from home as a top criterion for their next job.

This is a great development for many companies and individuals, but what a lot of people might not know is that the hackers have also been watching with interest. In fact,?cybercrime has increased by 600%?since the start of COVID-19, and?61% of malware?sent to companies during 2020 targeted remote workers through their cloud applications. We’ve all seen the Zoom bombing stories.

These are just some of the reasons that I’ve been working with a company called Anapaya. With its partners, it has developed a new internet protocol called SCiON, which effectively creates closed user groups on the public internet that operate independently of BGP route management systems. This gives organizations control over how they route their data traffic, while being resistant to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and hijacking attacks. It combines the openness and flexibility of the internet with enhanced security, reliability and performance. (I’m sure you have also suffered through those online meetings where someone freezes on screen.)

That’s why I think it’s an ideal solution for many companies – and particularly for telco providers that provide B2B connectivity services. I could go on, but I actually gave a talk about it earlier last week as part of an event called SCiON Day. So if you’re interested to find out more, have a look at how we can shape the internet in this new cybercrime era, and transform how organizations do business.

Photo credit:?Pixabay