Cybersecurity breaches are frequent, frustrating and becoming more massive with each new headline.
Anthem experienced the worst data breach in healthcare history in 2015. More than 78.8 million records were stolen by a foreign government that does not have strong diplomatic relations with the U.S. The records included the names, birth dates, Social Security numbers and home addresses of individuals who did business with the company or even applied for a policy.
The more recent Equifax breach dwarfed that number, with 145.5 million people affected.
Some companies know they are in the cross hairs of the best cyber criminals in the world:
Do you have a database of health care data that would be valuable on the black market?
Do you process over one million credit card transactions per year?
Are you in the payroll or money-transfer business?
Are you developing a technology that foreign governments would be interested in?
Are you in a business that a hacktivist group or nation state may find ethically questionable?
If you can answer yes to any of the above questions, congratulations, you are in the highest-risk group.
Most companies are not in the highest-risk category. The remaining companies fall into three large groups, including those that operate within a significant regulatory environment, such as banking or health care; those with data that others could monetize, such as credit card numbers; and those with data that is important and necessary for a company to operate.
Cyber criminals have figured out an important new angle to their business model: companies that don’t have information that’s valuable on the black market still have information that’s valuable to the company itself.
The bad guys are finding a way into a company, encrypting as much data as possible, and then extorting money from you to get your own data back.
In today’s world, everyone is a target. Every company wants to prevent business disruptions. Ransomware attacks are designed to disrupt your company’s ability to do business until you pay up. That begs a common question: How can I assess my actual cybersecurity risk?
The truth is that you can’t. This is similar to assessing your risk of contracting a certain disease or of having a tornado damage your home. These things happen infrequently; as such, it’s impossible to say that a given company will experience a cybersecurity incident of X dollars in total damage every Y years. A better plan of attack is the following:
Accept that your company is a target of cyber criminals that would hope to profit from your success, either by stealing your information or encrypting your information and ransoming it back to you.
Assess your relative risk. The areas to take into account include company size, your industry, the number of countries you do business in (especially those known to support government-sponsored hacking), and the strength of your cybersecurity defenses.
Assess your own risk tolerance, the potential damage to your company that a hacker could inflict, and your current what cybersecurity countermeasures. If you employ strong countermeasures, your risk will be far lower than many of your competitors, even if putting an actual number on it is challenging.
One of the best ways to quantify your cybersecurity risk is to get quotes for cybersecurity insurance. For example, if your building’s fire insurance policy costs $10,000 per year for $1 million in coverage, then the insurance company thinks you will have a large claim on that policy less than once every 100 years. Otherwise they would lose money selling you the policy. In fact, they are probably guessing that you will have a large fire once every 500 years so that they make a good profit on the policy.
If it costs $250,000 for the same coverage, your risk of having a fire is much higher than that. The cost of a cybersecurity insurance policy will help you determine the relative risk of a cyber incident in comparison to another type of business incident, such as a fire or flood, an operational issue, such as the loss of a key executive or a liability issue.
It’s imperative to realize that regardless of size, reach, and financial level, your company is a target for cybercrime.
All that really matters is if a criminal feels there is a good return to be had on their investment of time and money. If your defenses are poor, then their effort level is low. If you have strong defenses, then the return must be high for the adversary to expend significant effort to breach your systems.
They are looking for easy targets. All companies are susceptible, but with the right cybersecurity defenses, such as multi-factor authentication, a strong antivirus package, and a solid data backup routine, cybercriminals will deem your company too much effort to hack.
This is your opportunity to make cybersecurity a competitive advantage for your company!
Author: Bryce Austin
Source: Inside Business.
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