A Palestinian youth wearing masks used by computer hackers who attacked a number of Israeli websites recently, seen backdropped by the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City, April 8, 2013. Photo: Sliman Khader/Flash90.

CTech – The dark web’s business activities are flourishing because cybersecurity is not doing its job, according to Noam Froimovici, managing director at endpoint protection company Kaspersky Lab Israel. Froimovici spoke at the Dark-Web Economy conference held Wednesday in Tel Aviv by Herzog Fox & Neeman and Herzog Strategic, in partnership with CTech by Calcalist.

The same old malware and techniques that were used years ago are still being sold on the dark web for millions of dollars because they can still cause disruptions to businesses, Froimovici explained.

“If you take a pill and it is doing you more harm than good, then you stop taking it. But that is not how it works in the cybersecurity world — they keep on taking it,” Froimovici said. The fact that the phone of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was hacked shows that money can not buy everything, he added.

“When we started in 1998, we had 50 malware attacks per day. In 2018, there were 380,000 unique attacks per day — that we found,” Froimovici said. “You are being protected from most of them.”

The problem is the 0.01% of attacks that traditional software cannot protect against, according to Froimovici. “Our success rate on these is not as high as we would like.”

Computers used to be a tool to help out businesses, but now computers are the business, Froimovici said. Companies need to make sure that the cost of the attack is greater than the cost of the damage, otherwise there is no use in such protection, he said.