A new report aims to shed light on what motivates security professionals to choose to become black hats over white hats as part of a broader study on the overall cost of cybercrime.
To learn more about the organizational cost of cyberattacks and what lures hackers to the “dark side,” Malwarebytes and Osterman Research polled 200 security pros between May and June 2018. They found security-related costs are enormous and growing, partly due to a spike in breaches and partly due to a proportion of industry experts donning “gray hats” and dabbling in cybercrime for money.
The cost of crime can be broken into three parts: budgeted costs for security infrastructure, services, and labor; off-budget costs related to major security incidents; and handling the cost of insider breaches. An organization with 2,500 employees can spend about $1.9 million on security, according to the new report, “White Hat, Black Hat and the Emergence of the Gray Hat: The True Costs of Cybercrime.”
