The 2020 health crisis brought radical changes for the cybersecurity industry, with areas forced to support a remote workforce. The situation traditionally called BYOD (bring your own device), optional for some employees until 2020, has now become mandatory and put terminals on a battlefield where security solutions of companies did not have scope and where the security perimeter was from the employee himself. Google stated that it blocks more than 100 million phishing emails per day, and that 68% of them are new and never seen before scams.

The first impact for companies was the loss of visibility of attacks and the ability to protect their users and by 2021 cybercriminals are expected to further fine-tune their malware to search for connected devices that indicate corporate use. These types of crimes include data damage and destruction, stolen money, loss of productivity, theft of intellectual property, theft of personal and financial data, embezzlement, fraud, post-attack disruption in the normal course of business, and damage to reputation, with incalculable damage. Officials explain from Lumu Technologies that the credentials of access to VPNs will be increasingly coveted, in a scenario of increased attacks, as a consequence of the pandemic and the national socio-economic crisis. Cybersecurity plans projected for 2020 had to be modified because their implementations did not adjust to reality, according to Ricardo Villadiego, CEO of Lumu Technologies, went from having 300 clients to more than 1,000 in the last six months of 2020.

Digital banking: the favorite target. From the financial sector, the problem must be focused on two parts: from the operability and from cybersecurity. David López, vice president of sales for Latin America at Appgate, remarks that their Latin American customer base saw a 150% increase in unusual transactions, which the system classifies as suspicious. In addition, during the second quarter of the year there was a 24% increase in electronic fraud attempts and in the third quarter, there was an additional 18% increase. For the same period, attacks of unauthorized use of the brand for fraudulent purposes grew 174%, the most prominent practice was the creation of websites that induce users to contact a phone number where the fraud is carried out. And phishing numbers are up 38% over the past three months. "For us it is not something new, but it is part of the changes of the digital transformation," López told Convergencia.

Although the bank resolved the issue of cloning, fraud migrated to card transactions not present and breach of management processes in a second semester with an 80% increase in unauthorized use of the brand. The so-called risk-based authentication, which was created for financiers, will become the obligatory path for everyone by 2021 and it is expected that the value of a company will largely depend on how it protects its data and the strength of its cybersecurity.

Zero Trust. In the midst of this scenario, Appgate created a user-centric security model, with a software-defined perimeter, that creates one-to-one network connections between the user and the resources they access, complying with the "zero confidence", which reduces the attack surface. The system was launched a few years ago but was implemented in 2020 for Latin America. Zero trust can also be characterized as a zero assumption, that is, assuming nothing and authenticating everything, in order to eliminate areas of ambiguity. This principle underlies most on digital interactions, such as payments, or logins to websites. However, historically, in email, the fundamental approach is to allow everything to pass and only stop "the bad." A zero-trust approach redefines tradition and you don't trust anything until it is verified it deserves to make it to your inbox.

SAAS applications in focus. Today companies depend on SaaS (Software as a Service) applications for multiple tasks. In short, it is a software distribution model in which the support and data used are hosted on a company's servers, and then employees access via the web, that is, the software is not stored locally. From Onapsis, an Argentine startup dedicated to the cybersecurity of critical business applications, Ezequiel Gutesman, Vice President of Engineering and Research, said that in recent months they had to hire more than 40 people in the Argentine team, with technical development profiles of software, quality engineers and quality research professionals. The company also has offices in Boston, the United States, and Heidelberg, Germany and this year it obtained a round of financing for US$ 55 million to strengthen its expansion to critical applications in the cloud; which positions it as a possible future Argentine unicorn.

For Gutesman the key is in the interconnection of cloud solutions and the information that flows from one place to another. With the explosion of interconnectivity of these systems, attention will have to be paid to a compound risk, which has to do with considering a connected ecosystem. The lack of maturity of the interconnected risk not only has to do with the information that flows from one system to another, but also with the different regulations that each one may have. It is very common for companies to focus on addressing vulnerabilities of each system but there is no notion of how vulnerabilities of interconnected systems influence. "We want to help understand this compound risk," he explained.

The custody of crypto assets is coming. Unlike what happens in traditional financial systems, the private cryptographic keys of digital asset holders are unique and irretrievable, so their loss or theft means that it is impossible to irreversibly access the funds. The loss of funds due to theft or hacking in 2020 exceeded US$ 5.4 billion, tripling the 2018 figure.

In Europe, BBVA will launch its cryptocurrency sale and custody service at the beginning of 2021 and at a local level, Prosegur presented Crypto, a service that consists of safeguarding private keys of its clients through a solution that enables the storage and transactions of their funds. It is made up of 6 layers of security: cybersecurity, physical security, operational security, hardware security, system security, and account security - which together include more than 100 protection measures.

"If for the small investor in digital assets the security of their keys and that of their funds is a worrying issue, for the institutional investor who handles large volumes of funds it is a truly critical issue,"assured Raimundo Castilla, CEO of Prosegur Crypto, to Convergencia.

Crypto targets the institutional market, mainly made up of public and private financial institutions, investment funds and managers, family offices or exchanges that manage or invest large volumes of digital assets and require institutional-level custody services.

As anticipated, they will incorporate other services in the future, such as the possibility of accessing the cryptocurrency liquidity market and obtaining profits on deposited funds.

This article was published in the 2020 Communications Atlas and Yearbook on Convergencia’s 25th anniversary.