Cyber Attacks and Related Concerns

We witnessed many cyber attacks on various companies in 2014, but the attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment was the most fatal and the hacker’s identity is not yet confirmed. FBI is blaming North Korean Electronic army because few North Korean IP addresses were traced during the investigation. Sony Pictures were about to release a comedy “The Interview” and the plot is the assassination of North Korean President King-Jo-Un , who is equal to God for North Koreans.

Hackers introduced themselves as ‘Guardians of Peace” GOP, sent a malware “Wiper” in Sony’s computer system infrastructure and deleted entire data from the servers. Hackers took all the official and personal emails and data. The impact was very controversial that Sony’s Co- Chairperson Ms Amy Pascal’s racial mail communications were also published by the hacker and she was fired.

According to Kaspersky main threat comes from external sources as Spam and then from
malware attacks in the form of viruses, worms and Trojans. Priority is always given to protect confidential data because from just one data security attack an average of $80000 is lost. Damages caused by one targeted attack are $2.4 million in an average. When a company’s IT infrastructure is attacked, the amount of data loss from internal operations is calculated as43%, financial data as 22% and client data as31%

Main concerns for a company should be protection of sensitive data, prevention of IT security breaches, mobile device management, unreliability of IT systems, and client management. Obstacles to maintain IT security are heavy expenditure, lack of IT awareness among stakeholders, complexity of IT products and services, lack of support from IT vendors, lack of staff training facilities, co-ordination issues between business administration department and IT department, and access to the corporate network through personal devices like mobile and laptop.

Main strategies companies adopt are installing anti malware protection, software update management, encryption of highly sensitive data, physical security of IT system against theft and calamities, implementation of disaster recovery policy, creating separate IT policy for laptops, pc s and notebooks and regular audits. IT threat is considered as the number one threat for any businesses, than economic instability, and brand reputation. IT threat also includes computer fraud, industrial espionage and intellectual property theft.

Economy of Apps

App industry is showing a high growth rate with huge number of downloads over the years. By June 2014 more than 75 billion apps were downloaded from Apple and 50 billion from Google Play.

Apple paid more than $10 billion to their app developers in 2014 but by the very first week of January 2015 Apples has already spent around $500 million for app development. In the US itself more than 627,000 app developer jobs were created in 2014 and across 155 countries 1.4 million app catalogues were distributed.

Global app economy was worth around $53Bn, in 2012 and the growth rate from 2012 -2016 is supposed to be at 66%. This sis made under the presumption that smart phone penetration in APAC and Latin American countries will grow than ever.

There are more than 3 million app developers in the world and majority of them are Asians. Amongst them android developers are about 71%, HTML5 51%, Apple ios developers are 50%.

As per the records every Indian has 17 apps and South Koreans lead with 41 apps per person. By the end of 2015 Indian app industry is supposed to grow by 66%. Department of Telecom is also trying to make use of this opportunity by setting up an app development centre within 3 years. They have already invested Rs 1000 crore for this purpose. This centre will give importance for local app distribution as Indians will be more interested in local apps.

In 2014more than 9 billion apps were downloaded by Indians compared to the 1.5 billion in 2012. The rollout of 4G network is going to the add the number of download in 2015. Major players in the app industry will be forced to change their business strategies as the competition increases.

At the same time those who think about app development business should also do a profit analysis. There are people more than 60% who said they are below the app poverty graph. Earnings are less and work is not steady and most of the contracts were short term. More than 30% of app developers are working on commission too.