WASHINGTON—In news no one wants to hear, most especially credit unions and financial institutions, a new Pew Research Center study suggests that cyber-attacks are going to become more frequent and threatening.
The new study, which is less analysis and more of a forecast, is the continuation of a 10-year study that has been conducted in conjunction with Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center on the issue of cyber-attacks and seeks to explore what might lie ahead. More than 1,600 respondents weighed in on the following issues:
- Major cyber-attacks: Sixty-one percent of respondents said that by 2025, there will a major cyber-attack that causes widespread harm to a nation’s security and capacity to defend itself and its people. “Security is generally not the first concern in the design of Internet applications. It seems as if the world will only wake up to these vulnerabilities after catastrophe occurs,” the study quoted one person as observing.
- But the counter-argument from at least one analyst was that there “will not be major cyber-attacks. There is steady progress in security fixes. Despite the Internet’s vulnerabilities, a distributed network structure will help thwart the worst attacks. Security standards will be upgraded. The good guys will still be winning the cyber-security arms race by 2025.”
- Pervasive connectivity has brought dramatic gains in productivity and pleasure but has created equally dramatic vulnerabilities. “There was considerable agreement among the experts in this canvassing that individuals—their accounts and their identities—will be more vulnerable to cyber attacks from bad actors in the future and that businesses will be persistently under attack,” the Pew Research Center said.
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