Ori Levi apologized as he took the stage at an October 2017 CryptoFriends Netup meeting in Barcelona. He had been up until 6 a.m. the night before, he said, and wasn’t used to public speaking.

Never mind: his speech raised eyebrows among the investors and blockchain experts at the event.

He was there to present Gladius, a venture that aims to use the blockchain to reward PC users for hiring out spare network bandwidth that can be used to deflect distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. With millions of users, the Gladius network could sponge up threats at low cost.

Paying household Internet users to help fight cyber crime might sound extreme. But companies today need all the help they can get. DDoS attacks are leading to losses of US$150 billion a year, Levi said. The average attack costs $500,000.

And DDoS attacks are just one of many threats now present in the IT world. In May 2017, hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide were hit by WannaCry, a type of malware that locks users out of their own systems until a ransom is paid.

Along with ransomware such as WannaCry, users must fight off viruses, worms, Trojan horses, spyware, phishing attacks, and a growing host of other online dangers. The way modern workers go about their jobs is not helping, either.

Go back a decade or two, and your staff would spend most of their time in your office, working on the IT systems and endpoints you gave them. That made it easy for you to build a wall around your people, cutting them off from the IT threats in the wider world…

Source: Cisco News