During the height of the pandemic the government was mocked when it released an advertisement portraying a ballerina who’d lost her job because of lockdowns, with the ominous tagline that “Fatima’s next job could be in cyber (she just doesn’t know it yet)”. While Fatima is now likely to be performing again, she would have joined a booming industry. The consultancy McKinsey estimates that $150bn was spent on cybersecurity in 2021, says Omar Moufti, product strategist for thematic and sector exchange-traded funds (ETFs) at BlackRock. And with other projections putting the global cost of cybercrime “in the trillions of dollars per year”, the sector is clearly set to become far bigger.
Digitisation fuels growth
The main reason cybersecurity has become a key trend is “the rapidly growing reliance on digital technologies and the internet”, says Moufti. From e-commerce, online banking, cloud computing, and the ‘internet of things’” (devices that can communicate with each other), online communication is becoming a bigger part of our day-to-day lives. Throw in the advent of gangs of cybercriminals, many implicitly or explicitly supported by various rogue states such as Russia and North Korea, and it’s not surprising
