By: Geeq  on Mar 27, 2023

Cybersecurity is often referred to as a game of “cat and mouse,” which is somewhat inaccurate since it misses the fact that the scale of the game is continually escalating. According to Statista, businesses spent around $8.5 trillion on cybersecurity in 2022, which could increase by up to 150% to exceed $20 trillion by 2026.

But that startling sum is only the headline. Upon examination, there are even more surprising statistics outlining the extent to which cybercrimes are draining the bottom line of businesses. Although the end objective may be anything from holding a company to ransom, to selling customer data on the black market, the immediate goal is always data theft. Therefore, protecting the security and integrity of data is paramount. This is where Geeq Data can play a role in helping enterprises step up their cybersecurity game.

Here, we round up some of the latest cybercrime research and how Geeq Data helps to mitigate or contain the risk of attacks.

Removing the leverage from ransomware attackers

According to IT service provider AAG, ransomware is the most common type of attack in the United States, accounting for 30 percent of all incidents, and in Europe, where it’s used in 26 percent of incidents. Ransomware breaches typically take longer to contain and are more costly than other types of attack, with the costs rising further when firms refuse to comply with ransom demands. Lockbit, one of the most prolific ransomware groups, has claimed responsibility for a number of high-profile attacks, including one on the Californian state finance department at the end of 2022. 

With Geeq Data, organizations can put any amount of company data onto a private enterprise blockchain. At Geeq, each node builds and maintains a ledger of data independently, so any attack on another node – or even all other nodes – cannot compromise the data integrity of a node that hasn’t been attacked.  In this way, Geeq provides a higher level of security than other blockchains. 

If Geeq Data is used for the most important or sensitive pieces of information, organizations will have a way to quickly identify which of these crucial data in their ordinary SaaS or graph databases have been tampered with and, depending on how they’ve used Geeq’s tools, will have systems in place to restore critical data after the breach – without paying ransomers a penny.

Reducing the time to contain a breach with enhanced data protection

Based on 2022 data, it takes a firm an average of 277 days to contain a data breach, and there is a direct correlation between the amount of time it takes to contain a breach and the cost to the firm. Hackers are constantly developing more sophisticated attacks that are harder to detect.  Without a tool like Geeq Data, one can only expect breaches to do more damage. 

Retrieving backups and verifying the quality of data can consume a vast amount of time following a breach, much of which can be spent on contacting and reassuring customers. But even if a firm is able to restore its data, how will it be able to prove to its customers that the new data accurately reflects their old records?

From the customer’s perspective, Geeq Data blockchains are completely invisible. Yet they can mean the difference between receiving a notice that their personal data may have been compromised with an offer for annual identity protection services while the company tries to determine what happened versus receiving immediate, complete reassurance over the status and quality of their data with a clear action plan. Geeq Data is constructed to deliver proofs that are unambiguous and easy to verify, which enables firms to provide certainty they are doing everything they can for their customers and their data. 

Enabling more secure remote working

The pandemic normalized remote working for many organizations, but it comes at a cost. It’s now estimated that remote working adds an average of $1 million to the cost of a cyberattack, and attacks where remote work was involved take over 50 days longer to contain than attacks on company premises. 

With Geeq Data, attestations, metadata, and hash digests are stored on chains dedicated to your organization, accessible via an API. That means the organization can grant access to someone to use Geeq Data without allowing them inside the company’s firewall. Geeq Data gives organizations flexibility to grant or revoke access to write or view the data on the chain. 

For certain distributed workflows, especially for geographically dispersed organizations, Geeq Data adds an entirely new way to receive and validate data from external addresses while keeping the data within the firewall under its normal lock and key.  These solutions also solve data trust issues for companies who frequently work with external vendors or experience sudden changes in staffing.

Reducing supply chain vulnerabilities

Supply chains are a common target for cyberattacks, with nearly one-fifth of all cybersecurity losses globally arising from a breach of a supply chain partner. The average cost of a supply chain compromise to a firm stands at around $4.5 million. Attackers typically exploit vulnerabilities in EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) data flows using methods such as identity fraud – or, in one audacious case, by launching a ransomware attack on an EDI provider itself. 

Geeq Data attestations create more trust between supply chain partners by allowing all parties access to a single point of information regarding the provenance and location of goods. Moreover, Geeq makes integrating with your established enterprise supply chain infrastructure easy since it’s a stand alone layer that provides secure, time-consistent, neutrally validated transactions between partners. In the event of a breach on one side or the other, records from involved parties can be cross-checked against the provably unchanged Geeq Data records to restore the correct version of events. 

Being able to identify supply chain data breaches quickly and direct resources in a targeted way through Geeq Data introduces a uniquely new tool to ensure data integrity.  The ability to mitigate downside risk is a key to making supply chains more resilient. Best of all, the permissioning available for enterprise Geeq chains means any company is in control of who has access to their data.

Enhanced oversight of the enterprise data landscape

Given what’s at stake, perhaps the most surprising statistic is that only 5 percent of company files and folders are properly protected against cyber attackers. A report from cybersecurity firm Varonis uncovered that many firms are struggling to maintain oversight and control of their data, hoarding vast amounts of stale or overexposed data in legacy folders, documents, and systems that create an unquantifiable degree of risk. 

Data attestations provide a way for firms to gain better oversight of their data and prevent it from becoming vulnerable due to a lack of visibility in siloed or legacy systems. Geeq Data improves the consistency of implementing data governance across all departments and enterprise platforms, allowing a macro view of the organization’s data landscape as well as improving the ability to demonstrate compliance, a topic worthy of several articles and hundreds of use cases on its own.
Are you ready to up your cybersecurity game with Geeq Data?

To discover more, visit the homepage.