THE BRAVE NEW WORLD OF CYBER-ATTACKS
Cyber-attacks arguably pose the single biggest modern threat to businesses. The number of cyber-attacks, their level of sophistication, and the financial and reputational impact they have all continue to increase at an alarming rate. The research firm Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that cybercrime will cost $6 trillion globally by 2021. Inside actors, nation-state groups, and criminal organizations now often work together to deploy an ever-expanding array of social-engineered cyber-attacks. Common tactics include: spear-phishing, business email compromises (BEC), ransomware, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and Trojan horse malware.
The impact on both the public and private sectors is significant, creating unprecedented financial, operational and reputational risk factors for organizations worldwide. According to the SEC, the average cost of a cyber data breach is now $7.5 million. And the average cost of cyber liability insurance coverage has increased by 30% or more each year for the past several years. Worse still, with the growing popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT), there has been a 600% increase in the number of cyber-attacks on IoT-connected devices in the past year, especially those focused on medical devices.
The expanding use of the Internet and software applications has dramatically increased the number of vulnerabilities within information systems, networks, software and their respective endpoints, exposing each to the potential for fraudulent actions such as identity theft, identity fraud, business email scams and data breaches. The types of information that hackers consider most valuable include: intellectual property (IP), personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI) and payment card information (PCI).
From a regulatory standpoint, the continually evolving cybersecurity and data privacy requirements in the U.S. and abroad create significant liabilities for companies. The pending January 2020 implementation of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is of significant concern to organizations who do business in California, and could open a Pandora’s box of potential litigation related to data breaches involving the personal information of California residents.
As a result, C-suite executives are struggling to determine the right strategy and investments to secure their vital data assets, ensure business operations meet evolving regulatory compliance requirements, and reduce the impact of data breach litigation. The best practice to address each of these concerns is to implement a threat-based cybersecurity program, which takes steps to safeguard against the most likely threats an organization will face, juxtaposing internal vulnerabilities against the evolving external threat environment.
THE GROWTH OF THE CYBERSECURITY MARKETPLACE
The cybersecurity marketplace has rapidly grown to a $100 billion industry, offering a wide range of cybersecurity hardware, software and professional services. There are now an incredible number of companies offering cybersecurity technologies, products and services, often claiming to have the solution to many of your cybersecurity needs. Unfortunately, no single product or service can provide a magic solution to this multifaceted, ever-evolving, and highly complex set of global information security challenges.
Thus, many C-suite executives are trying to make the right investment decisions, but often they are not well informed regarding the cyber threats facing their organization and all the potential cyber liabilities. Rather than investing valuable resources in protecting specific types of high value data, a threat-based approach to cybersecurity identifies the vulnerabilities that a cyber-attack would likely try to exploit, and outlines measures to secure those vulnerabilities.
CYBERSECURITY FOR C-SUITE EXECUTIVES – TOP TEN CHALLENGES
Based upon our experience with hundreds of companies worldwide, across all industries, the following questions capture the most significant cybersecurity and data privacy challenges faced by the C-suite in most organizations:
THREAT-BASED CYBERSECURITY – GUIDELINES FOR IMPROVED BUSINESS RESULTS
We recommend a threat-based cybersecurity approach to combat cyber-attacks and mitigate costly cyber data breaches. Threat-based cybersecurity is forward-looking and uses analysis of a company’s unique threat profile to identify at-risk areas and protect against the most likely types of cyber-attacks that could occur. This requires a multipronged strategy and a range of proactive steps, including:
SUMMARY
The C-suite worldwide is increasingly concerned about the growing risk of a massive cyber data breach, like those encountered by Capital One, Facebook, Equifax, and numerous government agencies. Thus, C-level executives within all organizations need to understand the value of the information assets they possess, the cybersecurity and privacy related risks, and then factor the benefits of cybersecurity investments and risk variables into their respective business equation.
Simply put, it is vital that C-suite executives adopt a threat-based cybersecurity strategy to understand the cyber threats they are facing, and then make the right investments to mitigate identified vulnerabilities, thereby reducing their cyber liability while also maximizing resources.