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Cost of Cyber Crime Up 19% For U.S. Businesses

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In its annual Cost of Cyber Crime study, the Ponemon Institute found that the average annual cost of cyber crime per large company is now $15.4 million in the United States. That figure has increased 19% from last year’s .

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7 million, and presents an 82% jump from the institute’s first such study six years ago. This year, losses ranged from $307,800 to $65,047,302.

Globally, the average annual cost of cybercrime is $7.7 million, an increase of 1.9% from last year. The U.S. sample had the highest total average cost, while the Russian sample reported the lowest, with an average cost of $2.5 million. Germany, Japan, Australia, and Russia experienced a slight decrease in the cost of cyber crime over the past year.

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To try to benchmark the complete cost of cyber crime, the Ponemon Institute examines the total cost of responding to incidents, including detection, recovery, investigation and incident-response management. While it is virtually impossible to quantify all of the losses due to reputation damage or business interruption, the researchers did look at after-the-fact expenses intended to minimize the potential loss of business or customers.

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Check out more of the study’s findings in the infographic below:

global cost of cyber crime ponemon institute

Insider Fraud: How to Identify and Prevent Internal Threats

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Organizations of all sizes, across all industries have become data breach victims as cyber crooks become more sophisticated in identifying vulnerable targets.

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Attackers can compromise an organization within scant minutes in 60% of breaches, reports the latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report. Still, insiders persist as one of the biggest fraud perpetrators, costing organizations globally about $3.7 trillion annually in 2014, estimates the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. The puzzling question is this: With the advances in technology, why aren’t organizations preventing these incidents and why aren’t the offenders being nabbed earlier?

The answer to the insider fraud dilemma lies in a lag in robust risk-management technologies that help organizations identify and prevent insider fraud, especially in such industries as banking. With this type of breach, tracking behavior becomes a key component of managing risks and threats proactively. While basic data tracking isn’t new, what is fresh is grasping the internal behavior of employees in a real time, comprehensive view across multiple platforms and applications.

Unfortunately, disparate legacy systems that don’t share information easily create larger problems by limiting an organization’s ability to monitor across all systems. And siloed information makes it impossible to find “normal” employee behavior that should serve as a benchmark for day-to-day activity.

For example, banks must be on the lookout continually for employees who exhibit illegal behavior when, say, handling a dormant bank account, who are manipulating customer information or who collude with colleagues.

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By benchmarking regular employee activity and leveraging link analysis to spot relationships across accounts or employees, banks also can monitor for and spot instances of employee negligence that can offer cyber crooks easy access to customer data.

Sophisticated surveillance technology exists that lets organizations monitor and detect suspicious behavior in real time, then analyze and develop an evidence trail. Organizations can use the following activities to help identify and prevent an internal threat before it escalates and triggers substantial monetary and brand damage.

  • Monitor all user activity: It is critical to establish what is normal and what is abnormal. Each organization has different user personas with unique activities considered “normal.” By defining organizational benchmarks for normal versus abnormal activity, risk managers can identify inconsistencies in employee behavioral patterns.
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    Visibility into user activity across applications and networks enables them to highlight incidents that warrant deeper analysis and determine threats.

  • Track behavior in real time: Rather than analyze data retroactively, organizations should adopt a solution which can alert from the moment data is captured from the corporate applications and networks. Long-lead systems or those heavily reliant on log-file data don’t allow for real-time tracking and often result in discovering a breach after the fact.

Enable searchability: Organizations can deploy a user-friendly monitoring system with Google-like searchability features with highly specific behavioral criteria. Moving beyond clunky legacy systems to technology that is intuitive eliminates user error and enables more advanced rule-based monitoring.

  • Record screen activity: Gaining visual evidence of illegal activity while it occurs is critical for use during an investigation. Technology that records screen-by-screen activity at the application level creates the comprehensive data trail needed for courtroom presentation.

A combination of these activities can assist organizations in identifying anomalies in employee behavior, track digital activities and contrast them with an employee’s normal routine or that of a peer group’s pattern. If incongruities appear, advanced risk-management technology develops a data trail and a case strong enough to stand up in court. Leveraging these measures, insider fraud can be discovered at an earlier stage to prevent customer data breaches and malicious attacks.

Malware Threats from Unlicensed Software: The Critical First Step for Cyberrisk Management

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Waking up to find your company on the front page news and at the center of a data breach is every CEO’s worst nightmare—and for a number of businesses, it has become reality. Today, the threats from cybercrime are real and frightening, and the risks are extraordinary. Cybersecurity is an incredibly complex issue and business leaders are grappling with how to best protect their businesses, understand the new business vulnerabilities, and identify what steps they can take to protect themselves and their customers from becoming a victim of cybercrime.

There is a strong case for organizations to put protection from malware at the top of their risk agenda. In the past year, 43% of companies experienced a data breach. The average organization experiences a malware event every three minutes, and the costs of dealing with that malware can be astronomical. The International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that enterprises spent $491 billion in 2014 as a result of malware associated with counterfeit and unlicensed software.

A threshold step to mitigating risk is gaining an understanding of your own network and if the software you are using is genuine and fully licensed. Unfortunately, many businesses are failing to take this basic and critical first step to protect themselves.

It has long been suspected that there is a connection between unlicensed software and cybersecurity threats. A new study commissioned by BSA | The Software Alliance and conducted by IDC confirms this as fact.

The study compared rates of unlicensed software installed on PCs with a measure of malware incidents on PCs across 81 countries. Given that 43% of the software installed on PCs globally in 2014 was unlicensed, it’s clear that many businesses are at risk. The findings were sobering. The correlation between the use of unlicensed software and malware is even higher than the correlations between education and income, or that between smoking and lung cancer. The implication for governments, enterprises and consumers is clear: assessing what is in your network and eliminating unlicensed software could help reduce the risk of cybersecurity incidents.

Fortunately there are proven best practices available to tackle the challenges around software licensing.  The world class standard for Software Asset Management is ISO/IEC 19770-1:2012. The importance of implementing internal controls for legal use of technology, including software, has become so critical that COSO now recommends it in its revised Internal Control – Integrated Framework.

While putting controls in place may sound simple, many businesses are missing this first step. Only 35% of companies have written policies requiring the use of properly licensed software. For CEOs, now is the time to start implementing best practices that will help mitigate security risks and avoid your business becoming tomorrow’s news headline. For more information on additional steps you can take, visit BSA’s website.

BSA Global Software Survey

Cyberattacks Targeting Big Companies Up 40%

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Five out of six companies with more than 2,500 employees were targeted in cyberattacks in 2014, representing a 40% increase last year, according to Symantec’s annual Internet Security Threat Report. But by no means does that imply big businesses are the primary target: 60% of all targeted attacks struck small- and medium-sized organizations.

The spear-fishing and fraudulent email scams deployed in these hacks have also become more effective. Overall, 14% less email was used to infiltrate an organization’s network, yet 2014 saw a 13% increase in attackers as the cause of a data breach, and the total number of breaches rose from 253 in 2013 to 312 in 2014. This notable increase in precision is a clear indication that companies are not updating their defenses to match current threats.

Fortifying against cyberbreach continues to demand even more concerted effort as malicious actors grow more sophisticated, introducing more and better malware to their campaigns. “While advanced targeted attacks may grab the headlines, non-targeted attacks still make up a majority of malware, which increased by 26% in 2014,” Symantec reported. More than 317 million new pieces of malware were created last year, meaning almost a million new threats were released daily.

Changes in the top causes of data breach offer both good and bad news. While 13% more cyberbreaches were caused by attackers and breaches due to insider theft increased 3%, Symantec found that 15% fewer were due to accidental exposure, theft or loss.

Check out the infographics below for more of Symantec’s findings and insights on how hackers operate:

Symantec 2015 Internet Security Threat Report

Symantec Path of a Cyber Attacker