Tech
As long as the cybercriminals’ business model works, companies are vulnerable to attack
When cybercriminals targeted the UK nursery chain Kido, it represented a disturbing new low for the hackers. They threatened to expose personal data about young children and their families, shocking parents and cybersecurity experts alike.
The Kido hack is far from an isolated incident. Cyberattacks have struck organizations across many sectors in the last year, disrupting businesses from retail to manufacturing.
These recurring attacks highlight an important reality—cybercrime has become a very profitable activity. While the official advice is not to pay hackers, the frequency of these attacks suggests that many companies do. They will want to avoid losing their data or having their business and reputation damaged. But most will never admit to paying up.
Whenever there is money involved, more criminals want to participate—which has led to cybercrime becoming an organized industry. Cybercrime has shifted from individual and uncoordinated group attacks to an established business model that generates revenue and mirrors genuine companies.
This model has its own supply chains, affiliates (for example, criminals who use the malware rather than developing it) and even customer support.
The cybercrime ecosystem has evolved to run using the “as-a-service” model. For legitimate businesses, this is an efficiency model that lets them pay to use something “as a service,” rather than purchasing it. Just as businesses use software or security as a service, criminals have mirrored this model into a similar underground economy of cybercrime.
In this underground market, hackers sell ready-made malware, rent out botnets (networks of infected devices), and run payment platforms. They even go as far as providing customer support and help pages for the criminals they serve.
Their customers may shop for ransomware as a service when looking to extort ransoms from victims. Others, looking to cause disruption rather than financial gain, rent botnets to conduct “denial of service” attacks that flood the victim’s systems with traffic and disable them.
In the cybercrime economy, criminals known as “initial access brokers” act as middlemen. These are skilled cybercriminals who break into systems, providing the initial access and selling it as a package for others to use.
The packages often include stolen data, usernames and passwords, or even direct access to compromised networks. This essentially opens the door for cybercriminals with fewer skills to compromise businesses.
Business is booming
This business model is not only thriving right now—it will also persist. That’s just simple economics—everyone involved in the “business” benefits. This includes the experienced hackers and malware developers who take their cut, the brokers selling bundled services and the service-hosting and payment-platform providers taking their share. It also includes the affiliate criminals carrying out attacks and collecting their profits.
This makes it low-risk and profitable, effectively the definition of a successful business. Societal attitudes towards hackers often glamorize them as genius outsiders, while hacking itself—particularly when large corporations are the target—can mistakenly be seen as a lesser crime.
But the truth is that when the cybercrime business model succeeds, it has a lasting impact on the wider economy. Trust in businesses in the UK and beyond is damaged.
The attacks on UK retailers such as M&S and Co-op were carried out using a cybercrime service called DragonForce. This is available for a fee, reportedly set at 20% of the ransom payment. In the case of M&S and Co-op, it caused major disruption to their operations, and millions of pounds in losses.
Meanwhile, the attack on the Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) caused production at the carmaker to be halted for weeks, resulting in a huge loss.
The JLR attack caused a ripple effect on sales, deliveries, the workforce and smaller businesses in the supply chain. These companies may face bankruptcy if proceeds from the loan underwritten by the government do not reach them all.
To interrupt this recurrence of attacks, it’s vital to break the cybercriminals’ model by addressing the two fundamentals that make it successful.
First, businesses should stop paying the criminals. As long as they pay, criminals will try their luck. But it is reported that nearly 50% of companies do pay up. This is money that will fuel this crime and encourage the hackers.
Second, companies must build better resilience into their infrastructure and operations. While companies’ security has improved greatly, they are still not investing enough in things such as AI to improve their resilience to attack and their ability to keep operating (or at least to minimize disruption).
This was evident in the attacks on UK businesses. It took M&S four months to restore all of its services, while JLR’s production will not be at full capacity for several weeks.
Both Harrods and Co-op maintained operations during their incidents. This minimized interruptions, prevented large data losses and reduced the financial hit to the businesses.
There are no quick fixes, but there are steps businesses can take to make cybercrime less profitable for criminals and less disruptive for victims. The UK government is heading in the right direction with the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill and its consultations on ransomware payments.
But the real change must come from companies themselves. Without commitment, the strongest policy and legislation will remain words on paper. While prevention remains critical for a company, resilience if the worst happens is what really decides how much damage an attack can cause.
If companies can maintain operations and refuse to pay ransoms, cybercriminals lose their extortion power. And without that power there will be less profit and so less interest. But maybe most importantly, fewer families like those affected by the Kido attack will worry about their children’s data being held hostage.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Photograph: Boutayna Chokrane
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Like all open-ear earbuds, the OpenFit Pro have an airy and open soundstage that delivers a more natural listening experience than regular earbuds — it’s closer to the experience of listening to speakers. You can make them sound even more immersive by activating the confusingly named Optimized for Dolby Atmos mode. I say confusing because this mode is neither a replacement for Dolby Atmos nor is it strictly for use with existing Dolby Atmos content. It is essentially Dolby’s best earbud-based audio software, which combines spatial audio processing (for a wider and deeper soundstage) with optional head tracking. Both of these features will work with any content; however, Dolby claims it works best when you’re listening to Dolby Atmos content.
It’s the first time Dolby’s tech has been employed on a set of open-ear earbuds, and it’s a great match. It boosts the perceived width and height of the space, and does so without negatively affecting dynamic range or loudness, something that often plagues similar systems. And yes, the effect is more pronounced when listening to Atmos than when playing stereo content. I’ve used Dolby’s spatial tech on several products, including the LG Tone Free T90Q, Jabra Elite 10, and Technics EAH-Z100, and this is the first time I’ve enjoyed it enough to leave it enabled for music listening.
Still, it’s not as effective as Bose’s Immersive Audio on the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds. Bose’s head tracking is smoother—particularly noticeable when watching movies—and its spatial processing is more convincing and immersive for both music and movies.
Where Shokz enjoys a big leg up on Bose is the OpenFit Pro’s call quality. The OpenFit Pro’s mics do a great job of eliminating noises on your end of the call. You could be walking down a busy street, hanging out in a full coffee shop, or even passing by an active construction site, and your callers probably won’t have a clue you aren’t sitting on a quiet park bench. As with all open-ear earbuds, being able to hear your own voice naturally (without the use of a transparency mode) eliminates the fatigue normally associated with long calls on regular earbuds.
Comfortable Design
Photograph: Simon Cohen
Comfort is a key benefit of Shokz’s OpenFit series, and the OpenFit Pro, with ear hooks that are wrapped in soft silicone, are no exception. Unlike previous OpenFit models, which position speakers just outside your ear’s concha, the Pro’s speaker pods project directly into your ears, and in my case, they make contact with the inner part of that cavity. This significantly increases stability, but over time, I became aware of that contact point.
They never became uncomfortable, but it’s not quite the forget-you’re-even-wearing-them experience of the OpenFit/OpenFit 2/+ models. As someone who wears glasses, I tend to prefer clip-style earbuds like the Shokz OpenDots One, and yet the OpenFit Pro’s ear hook shape was never an issue. Shokz includes a set of optional silicone support loops, presumably for folks with smaller ears or who need a more stable fit. They didn’t improve my fit, but then again, I’ve got pretty big ears.
As with all hook-style earbuds, the OpenFit Pro charging case is on the big side. It’s got great build quality thanks to the use of an aluminum frame, and you get wireless charging (not a given with many open-ear models), but it’s still way less pocketable than a set of AirPods Pro.
Easy to Use
Photograph: Simon Cohen
For the OpenFit Pro, Shokz has finally abandoned its hybrid touch/button controls in favor of just physical buttons, and I think it’s the right call. You can now decide exactly which button press combos control actions like play/pause, track skipping, volume, and voice assistant access, a level of freedom that wasn’t available on previous versions.
Ministeri adds that Chinese OEMs, ahead in software compared to Western makers in terms of autonomous driving tech, he believes, weren’t on show because right now they cannot launch any vehicles in the US. CES, therefore, is simply no longer “the right for stage for them.”
Andy Palmer, former COO of Nissan and former CEO of Aston Martin Lagonda, goes further. “CES used to matter to carmakers because the industry was borrowing technological credibility from Silicon Valley. Today that relationship has flipped. Automotive tech is no longer an exciting novelty, it’s to be expected,” he says. “Electrification, software, and ADAS are now industrialized technologies. They are no longer concept-stage theater pieces that need a Las Vegas stage.”
More importantly, Palmer, Nothard, and Ministeri all state that the center of gravity for the auto world has moved—both technologically and geographically—to, of course, China. This makes China’s main auto expo, which alternates each year between Shanghai and Beijing, now the location where carmakers must posture and preen.
Indeed, as WIRED pointed out in May last year, Shanghai 2025 wasn’t just a car show—it was a warning to the West. Having poached some of the best Western auto talent, China’s car industry set about showing how it was going to dominate globally in charging rates, ranges, design, tech, and sheer volumes. Detroit and Munich were put on notice. It was blindingly obvious to all in the industry where the new power lay.
“Shanghai has become more strategically important than CES for many manufacturers,” Palmer says, “because that’s where the fastest innovation cycles, supply chains, and consumer demand now sit. If you want to signal the future of automotive, that’s increasingly where you do it.”
Chinese automakers aren’t merely content with showing off on home turf, though. So with CES out of the question, they’ve been looking for a replacement. Step forward Munich’s IAA Mobility, now Europe’s largest car convention following the death of the Geneva Motor Show. “The Chinese are looking for a platform to show off their products outside of China,” says Ministeri. “When you’re Mercedes or BMW, and you see China investing in the IAA, you have to be there. So they make huge investments. This year, at IAA, was the most beautiful stand for Mercedes I’ve seen in 10 years going around motor shows.”
For CES, and perhaps by extension US auto brands, to get back to a place of dominance in the global car business, another truly seismic change in evolution of vehicles will have to take place. And, what’s more, the rate things are going, an annual event such as a car show will very soon come too late to keep pace with progress in China.
“Look at Chinese manufacturers’ lead time: from R&D to deliveries in two years on average,” Nothard says. “They’re bringing cars to the market very quickly. A traditional manufacturer’s average is seven years. So now you can’t have enough shows to deliver your new product. BYD, they’ve got a whole line of products on the horizon. Masses of new BYD product will be in the market before the next shows are even started to be created.”
“CES was at its peak point when software and interface, and software-defined vehicles became the pinnacle of everything that was happening in the auto sector, alongside EV technology. We’re now past that,” Nothard says. “It’ll take another big shift in the evolution of the car for CES to be put on the radar again.”
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