Virginia Economic Review

Virginia is a national leader in the cybersecurity and technology industries, offering tech firms access to the highest concentration of tech talent and the third-largest tech industry workforce in the country.

Steve Morgan is the founder of Cybersecurity Ventures, a leading cybersecurity research company that provides data and insights on global cybercrime to C-suite executives, and editor-in-chief of Cybercrime Magazine. Before starting the company, he worked for antivirus giant McAfee Corp.

Virginia Universities' Transdisciplinary Research is Driving Digital Security Advancements The world’s increasing connectivity offers more opportunity for cybercriminals. The FBI’s 2020 Internet Crime Report cited a 69% increase in complaints of suspected cybercrimes.

Luiz DaSilva is executive director of the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) and Bradley Professor in Cybersecurity at Virginia Tech. Before coming to Virginia, he served as the director of CONNECT, a telecommunications research center at Trinity College Dublin.

2020 saw a number of records broken when it comes to the amount of data lost in cyberattacks. Damages from these attacks are projected to carry a global cost of $6 trillion annually, up from $3 trillion in 2015, reports Cybersecurity Ventures — and it’s only going to go up from here.

2021 started off with a cybersecurity boom: The White House officially blamed Russia for the SolarWinds hack, where its foreign intelligence service compromised a software supply chain to spy on thousands of targets, from Microsoft and FireEye to the U.S.