Cybersecurity has become an $80 billion industry, growing at 10 percent per year. But despite the hefty amount of investment in security tools and products, the number of attacks is outpacing the spend rate — and this has many industry leaders and security experts concerned.

“The number of attacks is increasing much more than 10 percent,” said Tom Kemp (pictured, right), chief executive officer at Centrify Corp. “We’re now in a situation where we really need to rethink how we do security as enterprises and as individuals.”

Kemp spoke to John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, about vulnerabilities in legacy systems, the financial impact of breaches and identity targeting by hackers. He was joined by Parham Eftekhari (pictured, left), co-founder and senior fellow at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, or ICIT. The conversation was conducted onsite at the Centrify campus in Santa Clara, California, as part of theCUBE’s “On The Ground” series.

Part of the problem is that attacks are increasingly focused on outmoded technologies, exploiting unpatched weaknesses. “They’re exploiting vulnerabilities that are inherent in our antiquated legacy systems,” Eftekhari said. “Our public and private sector organizations are being pummeled everyday by nation states, mercenaries, cybercriminals, script kiddies and cyber jihadists.”

The escalation of cyberattacks is taking its toll on companies. In the past, hackers would only obtain limited amounts of data or proprietary information after penetrating systems. Now the loss has become much greater, as attacks on Home Box Office Inc. and Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. have shown.

Companies lose billions in share value

“They can strip-mine an entire company,” said Kemp, who described a Centrify-sponsored survey that showed a public company loses an average of five percent of its value in a day after a successful attack. “We’re talking about billions of dollars of market capitalization that can disappear with a breach,” he added.

ICIT is working with legislators in Congress to address vulnerabilities in the nation’s election systems and provide a security “score” for devices. Users can help their own cause by engaging in better “cyber hygiene” through practices such as stronger passwords and being more vigilant about sharing information on social media, Kemp advised.

“Identity has become the top attack vector going in. The hackers are social engineering the actual users,” Kemp concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s “On The Ground” interviews. (* Disclosure: Centrify Corp. sponsored this segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Centrify nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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