The State of Cyber Security: Your Forgotten Floppy Disks Can Sleep Easy… or Maybe Not?

I recently wrapped up a FinTech course at the University of Hong Kong, and it stirred up some nostalgia—the screech of dial-up modems, dot-matrix printers farting out receipts, and, of course, the almighty floppy disk. Back then, “security” meant slapping on a password like 1234 and hoping your puppy didn’t chew through the cables.

Fast forward to today, and the game has completely changed. Cybercrime isn’t creeping along—it’s sprinting at full tilt. Consider this:

Microsoft estimates 600 million cyberattacks happen every day.

The University of Maryland found attacks strike every 39 seconds—that’s over 2,200 a day.

Cloudflare goes even bigger, reporting 225 billion hostile events daily across botnets, scans, and injection attempts.

In other words, every time you blink, someone somewhere is trying to slip through a digital crack.

And it’s not just about the numbers—it’s about impact. Global cybercrime damages are projected to hit $10.5 trillion annually by 2025, rivalling the GDP of entire nations. In the first half of 2024 alone, the U.S. recorded 1,700 data breaches, affecting 165 million people. Amazon fields 750 million daily threat attempts, much of it fuelled by AI-enabled malware. And DDoS attacks? They’ve exploded—over 8 million in the first half of 2025, with some reaching terabit-per-second firepower in Europe.

Ironically, those old floppies—fragile as they were—seem quaint compared to the relentless, AI-driven, botnet-powered assaults we face now. The UK Met Office alone fended off 40,000 threats a day in 2024, while India’s universities suffer 8,487 attacks per week—twice the global average. And let’s not forget the phishing scams that keep filling inboxes with expired credit card warnings.

The bottom line? Floppy disks may have been clunky and slow, but at least they didn’t come with ransomware. Today’s cyber world is a nonstop battlefield, with attackers leveraging automation and AI at scale.

We can’t go back to the floppy era (unless you’re curating a retro tech museum), but we can laugh at how far things have come—from magnetic disks to machine-learning firewalls.

So, the next time your antivirus pings, remember you’re not just protecting files—you’re standing in the middle of a digital Battle Royale. And yes, floppy disks had their charm… but we’re not really in a rush to bring them back, or maybe we should…

Thoughts welcomed, as always.

MC