MUCHUI: Cyber risk should be key agenda for today’s boardrooms

The board of directors of an organisation needs to consider cyber risk as a key business risk and not an IT back office issue. Increasing hyper connectivity, technological growth including Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence and remote work policies continue to introduce new cyber risks and vulnerabilities and soon cyber risks will overshadow all other risks facing the organisation.

This is the primary reason why boards need to discuss cyber risk regularly and ensure it is woven into value creation strategies of the organisation.

Cyber risk can crystallise in various forms such as an attacker cracking an admin password to gain unauthorised access to company systems. A distributed denial of service attack, where the organisations servers or network resources are flooded with internet traffic by multiple compromised computer systems or IoT devices with the aim of making them crush or slow down.

Subsequently, the attacker can extort money from the organisation in order to unlock the company’s servers or network resources. Also, a cyber-attack can be opaque, when the organisation is an…