• Swindon & Wiltshire Tech
• Thursday October 3 2024
• Author Name: Peter Davison

Cybercrime industry as big as world’s third largest economy, tech summit hears

The cybercrime industry is as big as world’s third largest economy, delegates at a tech summit in Bristol have been told.

The cybercrime industry has an annual GDP of $8 trilion – which is almost double the size of the German and Japanese economies respectively.

On average there are 710 million phishing emails blocked by businesses per week – and 91 per cent of successful cyber attacks start with an email.

That was the message from Alex Popham, senior security technical specialist at Microsoft and guest speaker at the Nebula September Summit, which was held at Bristol Aerospace – home of the iconic Concorde.

The annual summit, organised by Nebula IT, attracted more than 70 business professionals and leaders.

Founder and managing director Chris Pottrell explained: “The aim of the event is to give businesses an overview of IT, cyber and AI trends and share practical information and takeaways they can use in their own businesses.

“Knowledge is power and the accumulated wisdom of the speakers will have given attendees’ information about how they can protect their businesses better from cyber-attacks and harness AI to boost productivity.”

Another guest speaker, Nathan Stokes, described how changes to working practices have adversely affected cyber security.

In his talk Microsoft, AI and the modern workplace Nathan Stokes revealed that four in five security teams agree that remote and hybrid working has negatively affected their organisation’s cyber security and more than 50 per cent of the workforce in 2022 moved towards hybrid or full-time remote positions.

Nathan also referenced a major global study called the Microsoft Work Trend Index, which coined the phrase ‘digital debt’ and revealed that 68 per cent of people surveyed say they struggle with the pace of work.

The survey also showed that 60 per cent of employee time is spent on emails, chats and other similar tasks and only 40 per cent of time was spent creating.

Nathan also looked at the impact that AI is having on how we work and revealed that it took only three months for Chat GPT to reach 100 million users, compared to mobile phone usage which took sixteen years, the internet seven years and Facebook four and a half years.

Chris concluded: We all know AI is bringing about fundamental changes to how we work and engage, both with employees and customers.

“Those who adapt and leverage AI positively will be the winners, and the event provided attendees with a peak behind the curtain to what technology is available and the impact it will have.”

Image courtesy of Laura Power

Latest: Fast-growing IT business achieves sought-after accreditation