Back away from the snooze button. This is a $29 million wake-up call you can’t afford to miss. In January 2019, Yahoo’s board agreed to pay the enormous $29 million settlement to its shareholders as the result of cyberattacks that compromised three billion Yahoo user accounts. It was the first time shareholders had successfully held a company responsible for data breaches. And it is a loud warning to corporate boards that they must start paying attention to cyber risks. But are they?
Despite higher levels of investment in advanced cybersecurity technologies over the past three years, less than one-fifth of organizations are effectively stopping cyberattacks and finding and fixing breaches fast enough to lower the impact, according to a new report from Accenture.
Apparently, we are getting in our own way when it comes to advancing cybersecurity. According to a leading 2018 study by the Ponemon Institute LLC (sponsored by IBM), the three primary causes of data breaches were malicious or criminal attack, system glitch and human error. While the study reports that the length of time to identify and contain, and the cost, were lower for data breaches caused by human error as opposed to the other categories, it is an issue that nearly 27 percent of data breaches are caused by human error.
This year has been a busy year for organizations and hackers alike, and terrible passwords remain unchanged. What are this year's top 25 worst passwords?
Just in 2018, there were 500 million personal records stolen. How many records will be stolen by year’s end? According to the RiskBased Data Breach QuickView Report 2019 Q3, at the end of September, there were 5,183 breaches, exposing 7.9 billion records. Compared to the 2018 Q3 report, the total number of breaches was up 33.3 percent and the total number of records exposed more than doubled, up 112 percent.
Benjamin Franklin once said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” These sage words unfortunately describe the dilemma many companies are facing on a daily basis with increasing frequency. Whether because of a lack of resources to commit to cybersecurity or the C-suite’s reluctance to do things differently, companies are suffering from a rash of bad actors seeking to profit from cyberattacks and the loss of data because of negligent handling by insiders.