While some organizations have spent decades fine-tuning their ability to respond to and manage cyber risks, far too many are still playing games with their security strategy.
From a cybersecurity perspective, 2017 will go down as a record year for data breaches. The Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reported 1,579 breaches, up 45 percent from 2016. By itself, 2017 accounted for over 22 percent of all the data breaches tracked by the ITRC between 2005 and 2017. Over 50 percent of those breaches exposed Social Security numbers, and nearly 20 percent leaked credit and debit card numbers. Hacking accounted for 940 breaches, or 60 percent of successful compromises. While the ITRC only tracked five industry categories, over 55 percent of breaches targeted the business sector, followed by the medical/healthcare industry at over 23 percent.
So is there any glimmer of hope for security teams? The Ponemon Institute’s “2017 Cost of Data Breach” study found that the global average cost per breached record went down from $158 in 2016 to $141 in 2017. Similarly, the global average cost per incident now stands at $3.62 million, down from $4 million in 2016. Companies that experienced…
