We warn you: IT safety is a priority

We would have preferred not to have been proven right so quickly, but unfortunately the WannaCry cyberattack confirmed everything that NaN-tic had been warning about just a few weeks earlier.

At the end of 2016, OpenExpo asked us to think about which topic we believed would be important in 2017 and to turn it into an article for the report Tendencias Open Source y Software Libre 2017. The result was an article signed by Albert Cervera and entitled “Security at the centre”, which highlighted the need to accurately assess the levels of security offered by technological solutions aimed at businesses.

The concern was neither accidental nor minor, as the facts demonstrated: 200,000 company and organisation computers were infected in more than 150 different countries. Shortly before, the consultancy Juniper Research stated in a report that cyberattacks would cause business losses of 2 trillion dollars in 2019—four times the amount recorded in 2015. The scale of technological security and insecurity in businesses is such that one million jobs for sector professionals were created in 2016 alone in an attempt to prevent it. And it has been shown that even this was not enough.

At NaN-tic, we are fully aware of this scenario. That is why, last November, we organised a free talk on computer security as part of NaN-tic Bitz. During the session, two professionals with extensive experience in computer security showed attendees that the risks are real and that people and companies expose themselves unnecessarily far too often.

Computer-security problems do not affect only large multinationals; they now affect everyone. Here too, open source can make things easier. Choosing open and transparent technologies means being able to understand precisely the barriers and mechanisms deployed to prevent attacks and, of course, being able to increase and improve them. For this reason, companies of all sectors and sizes have understood this scenario and are increasingly developing their security strategies with open-source technology in mind.

We invite you to read and share this open-source trends report to understand what awaits us.