The Economics of Cybercrime and Security
Building Cyber Resilience
How individuals, firms and governments can build resilience against cyber threats, and a recap of the module.
No system is perfectly secure. The goal is resilience: reducing risk and recovering fast.
For individuals
- Multi-factor authentication.
- Updates and backups.
- Scepticism about calls and links.
- Report fraud to 1930 quickly.
For firms
- Backups kept offline.
- Least privilege: limit access.
- Training staff.
- Incident response plans.
- Cyber insurance.
For governments
- Standards and reporting rules.
- Protecting critical infrastructure.
- International cooperation against cross-border crime.
Module recap
- Cybercrime costs trillions of dollars a year and keeps growing.
- Ransomware gangs run like businesses.
- Black markets enable specialisation.
- Externalities cause underinvestment in security.
- AIIMS was hit by ransomware in 2022.
- Cyber insurance faces correlated risk.
- CERT-In requires 6-hour reporting.
- Bug bounties reward ethical hackers.
- There’s a large skills gap.
- Attacks can disrupt infrastructure.
- Organised scam centres traffic workers.
The backup that saved the day
A school's computers are hit by ransomware. Because it kept offline backups, it restores everything within a day without paying.
Thinking perfect security is possible
Resilience means reducing risk and recovering quickly.
Key takeaways
- Resilience combines prevention and quick recovery.
- Individuals, firms and governments all have roles.
- Offline backups and MFA are powerful basics.
- Cooperation is needed against cross-border crime.
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