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Data Breaches Taking Slightly Longer To Detect, Study Finds

Despite rising global awareness of data breaches in various industries, organizations experienced an increase in the number of days to identify a data breach over the last fiscal year. According to a new study conducted by the Ponemon Institute and published by IBM, it takes an average of 197 days for a company to identify a breach – up six days from 2017 – and an average of 69 days to contain it (which also showed a three-day increase from 2017).

“We attribute the increase in days to the growth in the use of IoT devices, extensive use of mobile platforms, increased migration to the cloud and compliance failures,” study authors said in 2018 Cost of Data Breach Study: Impact of Business Continuity Management.

This year’s study included 2,634 employees from 477 companies in 17 industries in 13 countries and two regions. The study found that the average total cost of a data breach in 2018 is $3.86 million; $1.45 million is attributable to the most-costly component, which is lost business cost. The least expensive component is data breach notification at The least expensive component is data breach notification at $0.16 million.

Ponemon also included a framework for measuring the cost of mega breaches, which are breaches involving at least 1 million compromised records. There is also a special analysis of the cost to recover from a data breach.

Some notable findings include:

  • The average cost per compromised record at the surveyed organizations was $148 in fiscal year 2018, up from $141 in 2017 but down from $158 in 2016.
  • The larger the data breach, the less likely the organization will have another breach in the next 24 months.
  • Healthcare organizations took an average of 55 days to detect a breach, but 1,037 days to contain it.

To download IBM’s survey, click here.

Holding Executives Accountable for Cybersecurity Failures

The average cost of a data breach for companies surveyed has grown to $4 million, a 29% increase since 2013, with the per-record costs continuing to rise, according to the 2016 Ponemon Cost of a Data Breach Study, sponsored by IBM. The average cost hit $158 per record, but they are far more costly in highly regulated industries—in healthcare, for example, businesses are looking at $355 each, a full $100 more than in 2013. These incidents have grown in both volume and sophistication, with 64% more security incidents reported in 2015 than in 2014.

Ponemon wrote:

Leveraging an incident response team was the single biggest factor associated with reducing the cost of a data breach–saving companies nearly $400,000 on average (or $16 per record). In fact, response activities like incident forensics, communications, legal expenditures and regulatory mandates account for 59 percent of the cost of a data breach. Part of these high costs may be linked to the fact that 70 percent of U.S. security executives report they don’t have incident response plans in place.

With so much on the line, more and more companies and consumers continue to search for whom to hold accountable for cybersecurity failures, and the message is becoming clearer: executives need to get serious or watch out.

In a recent report from Bay Dynamics, “How Boards of Directors Really Feel About Cyber Security Reports,” board members expressed a surprising amount of confidence in their abilities to understand and act on cyberrisk threats and indicated there are real risks on the table for IT and security executives. Almost all of those surveyed said that some form of action will be taken should these executives not provide useful and actionable information, with 59% claiming there is a good chance one or more security executives would lose their job over such reporting failures.

More board members (26%) ranked cybersecurity risk as their highest corporate priority than any other risk, including financial, legal, regulatory and competitive risks, and 89% said they are “very involved” in making cybersecurity decisions.

Following the typical presentations from IT and security executives, more than three in five board members are both significantly or very “satisfied” (64%) and “inspired” (65%), but 32% are significantly or very “worried,” and 19% are significantly or very “confused” and “angry.”

According to the report:

Of the information provided to them during these presentations, the majority of board members (97%) say they know exactly what to do or have a good idea of what to do with the information. This statistic, however, does conflict with IT and security executives’ thoughts on the information they present. Based on our December 2015 survey, only 40% of IT and security executives believe the information they provide the board is actionable. There is a clear disconnect here between what the board perceives is actionable information, and what IT and security executives define as data that can be used to make informed decisions.

“IT and security executives are focusing on what they believe are the most impactful issues: a) forward-looking information about known vulnerabilities that could potentially harm the company in the future, b) specifics about data that was lost as a result of known infiltrations and data breaches, and c) the impact of these infiltrations and breaches,” Bay reports. “Interestingly, while information about how much is spent to address cyber risk is reported by IT and security executives in less than one-half of the companies surveyed, this was the most commonly cited information that board members said they needed to make investments for cyber risk planning and expenditures.”

Bay also pointed to a critical challenge in the education gap of many board members and the reliance upon information security executives: a large portion of the education board members have on infosec is from the organization’s IT and security executives, and “when the person education you on cybersecurity is the same individual tasted with measuring and reducing cyberrisk, there’s a fundamental disconnect.” It is extremely difficult for board members to understand what they are missing without education of their own and a third-party audit in place.

As cyberrisk continues to become a top enterprise risk priority, the consequences of failure may impact more of the C-suite than just chief information security officers or top IT executives. In May, following a social engineering fraud case that resulted in a wire transfer of 50 million euros, Austrian aircraft parts manufacturer FACC fired its chief executive of 17 years. Some regulators also want to start holding chief executives accountable in a way that truly speaks to them: their paychecks.

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According to a report from members of parliament on the British Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, Britain’s status as the leading internet economy in the G20 is under threat from a combination of increasing reliance on digital infrastructure, and inadequate protection of it. To address the issue, they suggest that chief executives who fail to prevent cybersecurity breaches have a portion of their pay docked.

Such was the case with Baroness Harding, the chief executive of TalkTalk, Britain’s fourth-largest broadband provider, which suffered a high-profile cyberattack recently.

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Her performance bonus was slashed by more than a third as a result of the company’s security failings.

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“Companies must have robust strategies and processes in place, backed by adequate resources and clear lines of accountability, to stay one step ahead in a sophisticated and rapidly evolving environment,” said Jesse Norman, chairman of the committee. “Failure to prepare for or learn from cyber-attacks, and failure to inform and protect consumers, must draw sanctions serious enough to act as a real incentive and deterrent.”

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

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 $12.7 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.

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.

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

global cost of cyber crime ponemon institute

Crisis Management in the Age of Cybercrime

[The following is a guest post by Richard S. Levick, Esq, president and chief executive officer of Levick Strategic Communications. You can Follow Richard on Twitter @RichardLevick where he comments daily on risk management and crisis management.] 

Immense as it may be, the March 30 Global Payments data breach that dominated headlines is only the latest in a series of events that made this current crisis eminently predictable. If there are any illusions that this breach was anomalous, consider the extent to which high-profile data breaches similarly dominated headlines in 2011.

Sony suffered over a dozen data breaches stemming from attacks that compromised its PlayStation Network, losing millions and facing customer class action lawsuits as a result. Cloud-based email service provider Epsilon suffered a spear-phishing attack, reportedly affecting 60 million customer emails. RSA, whose very business related to on-line security, experienced an embarrassing and damaging theft of information related to its SecureID system, necessitating an expenditure of more than $60 million on remediation, including rebuilding its tattered reputation.

And the list goes on.

Right now, just about all businesses face cyber risks. The worst include intellectual property losses due to economic espionage — by far the greatest risk to companies — as well as data breaches and ideological “hacktivists.” And the growth rate of those risks often exceeds a company’s ability to fight them.

Over the last decade, companies have experienced exponential increases in the volume and type of their digital assets along with an explosion in the types of storage devices that house them. With enterprise resource planning software, email, cloud computing, laptops, iPads, smart phones, and other portable devises, companies may have data storage systems that number in the hundreds. Managing and securing critical information has become a commensurately more daunting task.

As the situation grows worse, many boards and senior management now take a head-in-the-sand approach to cyber-threat management. A recent survey from Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab analyzed the cyber governance policies of the Forbes Global 2000. Its findings are troubling. “Boards and senior management are still not exercising appropriate governance over the privacy and security of their digital assets,” states the report. Less than one-third undertake even the most basic cyber-governance responsibilities.

These findings are supported by an in-depth look at cyber-crime published by PricewaterhouseCoopers late last year. According to the survey, which polled nearly 4000 executives from 78 countries, while cybercrime ranks as one of the top four economic crimes (falling just after asset misappropriation, accounting fraud, and bribery/corruption), 40% of respondents reported that they had not received any cyber-security training. A quarter said that their CEOs and boards do not conduct regular, formal reviews of cyber-crime threats, and a majority reported either that their company does not have – or they do not know whether their company has – a cyber crisis-response plan.

Welcome to the risk management officer’s worst nightmare.

According to the Ponemon Institute’s most recent statistics, the average cost of a data breach is $7.2 million with the average cost per compromised record coming in at $214. But the damage done by a cyber-breach goes well beyond the initial information loss. Real costs from business interruption, intellectual property theft, lost customers and diminished shareholder value due to reputation damage all can — and do — inflate those figures. In fact, for 40% of respondents in the PwC study, it is the reputational damage from cybercrime that is their biggest fear.

As cyber-risks continue to grow, companies must therefore focus on reputation as well as strengthening the mechanisms with which data is secured. A few things are imperative.

Boards and senior management must take responsibility for crisis response. Their objective must be to crystalize the company’s crisis instincts – to make crisis response part of the institutional DNA.

Crisis plans are actually counter-productive if they are created simply to be put on a shelf and read only when they are needed. Particularly in the context of cyber-crime, a realm in which new risks seem to emerge almost daily, the need to revisit and revise the plans is exigent. Regular rehearsals, refinements, discussions and additions transform the culture into one rooted in not the possibility but, rather, the expectation of crisis.

Education of employees is imperative. Employees often assume that securing company information is solely the responsibility of company IT specialists – an assumption fraught with risk. Every employee in an organization has the responsibility and the means to protect company data.

In addition to education, the key for companies is to keep less information in the first place, according to Paul Rosenzweig, Esq., founder of Red Branch Law & Consulting, PLLC. Backing up data on the other end is also vital. And while there are attendant costs involved, they are well worth it, he says. “In a world in which the bottom line is everything and the benefit of your expenditure may be recaptured only over years, if ever, this is hard,” said Rosenzweig. “It may well seem like all cost and no benefit in the beginning – that is, until the day it is all benefit and no cost.”

Companies must also designate a response team and ensure that all participants understand their roles. During a crisis, the response team must make critical decisions with too little notice and too little information. Regular meetings ensure that team members understand their individual responsibilities and develop trust in one another. Periodic crisis team exercises allow companies to capture what goes right and what goes wrong in each simulation. The lessons learned are critical when a real crisis is at hand.

When a data breach does occur, companies must make full disclosure as quickly as possible and let stakeholders know how they plan to remediate the situation so that it will not recur. Focusing on corrective future initiatives can restore trust.

With the advent of new technologies, the risks for companies are now greater than ever. Companies’ ability to recognize this moment and transform the way they think about their information is key to long-term sustainability and brand value.