The ever growing threat of cyber attacks around the world has highlighted the need for a global collaboration on cyber security intelligence sharing. For years, the private and public sectors have worked separately to come up with the best network defense solutions to highlight the increasing cyber security concerns that continues to plague their respective sectors. But the reality is all these solutions presented have proven to be inefficient and ineffective in keeping up with the changing tactics used by cyber attackers.
As a result, the total cost of cybercrime will continue to skyrocket and is expected to exceed 6 trillion by 2021, according to an FBI Internet Crime Report.
There isn’t any quick solution to cyber threats. Enterprises can splash out stellar amounts of money to tackle this issue individually or they can collaborate and address this problem together by creating a network security force multiplier that will enhance global cyber security and protect enterprises worldwide. There is a name to this phenomenon “Cyber security Crowdsourcing”. By Crowdsourcing cyber security, businesses not only can minimize the cost of sharing cyber threat data but also they together with other collaborating enterprises can benefit from it.
Why We Need Crowdsourcing for Cybersecurity
Crowdsourcing is a very broad formula. Think of it as “Sharing expertise and cyber intelligence with the entities affecting an entire community”. By adapting to this formula, business can enhance the ability of their security experts to catch cyber criminals efficiently. Moreover, Crowdsourcing enables a more collaborative defense approach towards improving the potential for a more powerful cyber security system.
Three Types of Cybersecurity Crowdsourcing
“How to Crowdsource cyber security” is still a work in progress, but there are three possible ways through which we can harness the skills of security professionals of the cyber community to fight toe to toe with the cybercriminals.
Collaborating for a Specific Cause
Collaboration is one of the things enterprises can use as a tool to combat cyber threats. It can be done for various reasons such as to increase creativity by combining security experts of different fields to bring new ideas or to enhance the overall productivity of a security system. Collaboration works best when everyone; the enterprise, the employees, and the outside experts work together to strengthen the whole security system and prevent possible cyber threats.
Intelligence Sharing
Another effective way of crowdsourcing is through intelligence sharing, which combines the individual expertise brilliance of private and government entities. Both entities share their knowledge about cybersecurity and collaborate to fight cyber security threats by restricting potential online threats.
Reward-Based Collaboration
Reward-based collaboration is a common form of crowdsourcing cybersecurity and is being used by many tech giants such as Google, Microsoft and Apple.
In this form of crowdsourcing, companies invite cybersecurity experts to inspect and deliberately hack their security. If the security experts are able to find vulnerabilities, they are rewarded. The vulnerabilities in security are tested by a group of expert testers in a controlled environment.
Crowdsourcing cyber security is now a necessity
Crowdsourcing cybersecurity is the first logical steps towards building a holistic cyber security strategy companies have been figuring out for decades. With collaboration and intelligence sharing, industries can advance towards a secure cyber network where there is little possibility of failure. Implementation of Crowdsourcing can pay off investments in cyber defense across industries and every company can reduce costs in defending against cyber security threats. Moreover, crowdsourcing cybersecurity can help make industries more resilient and easier to defend against any kind of cyber threat or ransomware and minimize every potential threat in the future.
