It has been a busy year for large companies’ IT departments. Firms ranging from Marks & Spencer to Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) have seen their operations disrupted by cyberattacks. The incident at Jaguar is thought to have cost Tata (JLR’s owners) just under £2 billion. While not a cyberattack, the outage at Amazon Web Services in October also brought swathes of the internet to a halt, demonstrating that “when a single upstream provider experiences issues, the impact doesn’t stay contained; it cascades across industries”, says Fadl Mantash, chief information security officer of global pay-tech company Tribe Payments.

The main reason cybersecurity and cyberresilience are so important now is that “an increasing amount of life is conducted online, with almost all our devices connected, in some way, including vacuum cleaners and washing machines”, says Marijus Briedis, chief technology officer at NordVPN.

This is particularly true of the post-Covid business world, “where people are increasingly working away from the office”, says Kate Steele, partner in the commercial dispute resolution team at Hill Dickinson. As a result, companies “are relying much more on technology, both in terms of remote working systems, but also things like AI”. And “all the various crime statistics suggest that there has been a huge increase year on year in every type of cybercrime, from data theft to online scams”, says Steele.

NordVPN’s Marijus Briedis thinks the increasing number of threats stem from three main sources: script-kiddies, cybercriminals linked to organised crime, and state-sponsored groups. AI is also showing “the ability to expand cybercrime exponentially”, says Briedis, with generative AI allowing even the least technically savvy hackers to create malware in seconds.

AI can also help hackers carry out social engineering, where hackers persuade people to voluntarily hand over important security details by impersonating friends, family, colleagues, or customers. However, AI can be used defensively as well, detecting scams and phishing attempts at scale.

Quantum computing is seen as another emerging threat, with its ability to break encryption systems that would take thousands of years to crack using today’s technology. Companies should plan on being quantum-ready by 2030-2035, according to the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre.

The easiest way to invest in companies benefiting from the boom in the cybersecurity sector is through an exchange-traded fund (ETF) tracking a broad portfolio of cybersecurity firms, such as the WisdomTree Cybersecurity Ucits ETF (LSE: WCBR). Other notable companies include Akamai Technologies, Qualys, Fortinet, and Palo Alto Networks.