Executive Summary

2019 witnessed more intense challenges in global political and economic orders. Restricted by various conventions, agreements, and protocols, traditional military means are now the last resort. In this context, attacks on the financial sector and on the cyberspace become the first choices for rival countries to try on their modern military strategies. Predictably, these attacks will probably become regular approaches in the future. By the time when the 2018 Cybersecurity Insights was released, the following trends had taken shape regarding cybersecurity: The window between the discovery of a vulnerability and the effective exploitation of this vulnerability was shortened; the DDoS attack size steadily grew; emerging threats like those from the Internet of Things (IoT) rose sharply; such malware as backdoors, cryptojackers, worms, trojans, and botnets were still active. When it comes to information disclosure, the AcFun website was hacked, leading to a leak of nearly 10 million pieces of user data; India’s Aadhaar (India’s national ID database) number leak affected 1.1 billion citizens. Information disclosure events have hit record highs for six years in a row since 2013. The four enterprises, namely Facebook, Equifax, British Airways, and Marriott International, together were fined approximately USD 9 billion for privacy and information leaks, more than the aggregate market value of the cybersecurity industry in China in that year.