‘The bad guy only has to be right 1 percent of the time to get through,’ said one security firm founder.
On Nov. 3, 1988, long before most of the world would hear of dot-com and cyberspace, Eugene Spafford, an assistant professor of computer science at Purdue University, awoke to a peculiar problem: He could not log into his school computer from home.
At first, he thought his machine just needed rebooting.
“But later I started looking at system logs on that machine, and some others,” said Spafford, now in his 38th year at Purdue, via email to The Epoch Times. “And I found evidence that [a computer worm] had been present.”
The worm turned out to be the first stand-alone computer malware—created by Robert Tappan Morris, a Cornell University graduate student, who would soon become the first person indicted under the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
At the time, the number of potentially vulnerable machines hovered under 80,000 worldwide—and there was barely any such thing as cybersecurity.
In the 36 years since Morris’s worm, the world of computers and information technology has evolved into a multi-billion-dollar industry with more than 5.5 billion internet users—approximately two-thirds of the world’s population.
And behind the scenes, millions of cybersecurity professionals are fighting cyber criminals in an invisible war that is becoming more intense, more expensive, and more challenging than ever before to keep personal information and business operations safe.
“Cyber crimes are projected to reach $10.5 trillion by 2025, up from $3 trillion in 2015,” said Steve Morgan, founder of Cybersecurity Ventures and editor-in-chief at Cybercrime Magazine, a research and market intelligence firm with locations in Northport, New York, and Sausalito, California.
He said that since 2013, the demand for cybersecurity professionals has been so high that the estimated shortage since then has grown 250 percent—from 1 million to more than 3.5 million in 2024.
“It won’t be until sometime in 2025 that we look ahead with another prediction,” Morgan told The Epoch Times via email.
