If you are an independent contractor and/or a small business having an insurance policy is a must and offers you protection and peace of mind. Here are some quick tips on how to get started and safely covered as a Cybersecurity, IT and/or Technology professional.
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As we prepare for the annual October holiday season with Cybersecurity Awareness Month there is an important question to ask. Are we as a society at the point of fatigue over every new security breach, or are the companies getting breached just too big to fail?
Security giant Fortinet announced a data breach this week that was remarkable in two ways. One was how small the breach was (less than 500GB) Two was how calm Fortinet seemed to be about. Security gadfly Dr. Chase Cunningham posted a flippant comment about the breach on Linkedin, encouraging his followers to “buy on the breach.” He pointed out that with big public companies, in security or not, generally take a hit on their stock for a day or two after a breach, but the stock rises to new highs as the dust clears. And no one seems to care about the downstream customers whose data might have been stolen.
A 2010 study published in the Journal of Cost Management concluded that a company could be more profitable if it annoyed unhappy customers more than they already were. The success of that strategy increased with the size of the company, according to the study, and when there were fewer competitors for a customer to turn to.
The reasons for the success were simple. If a pissed off customer decided to go a smaller provider, there were always new customers who signed up, simply because they were the biggest. If there were no smaller competitors, the customer never went away. In the process, the offending company rarely has to pay out to make the customer whole. The study pointed our that companies like United Airlines have notoriously bad customer service, but they rarely lose market share because of it.
Kevin Szczepanski, co-chair of Barclay Damon's Data Security, is much more forgiving
Fifteen years ago, I wrote an article entitled “The CSO’s Myopia.”…
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More people than ever are working remotely. While this offers unprecedented levels of freedom and flexibility, however, it also comes with increased risks in the form of cyber threats.
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Small businesses face a myriad of cybersecurity threats, with ransomware and malware being the most prevalent. The consequences of such breaches can be profound and multifaceted, affecting various aspects of the business.
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Today’s organisations are all too aware of the potential financial, operational, and reputational costs posed by cybersecurity threats and the importance of fortifying defences and boosting their cyber resilience capabilities. And with good reason
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In order to understand the ever-changing regulatory landscape, we spoke to eight cybersecurity experts about the latest developments and how businesses should navigate their way through.
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It’s common practice that data security is cybersecurity today. As we continue to navigate through the digital transformation – and………more...
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“Your security is important to us,” is a common phrase on corporate websites and emails, usually after some data breach that affects customers. To prove that statement, corporations invest billions of dollars in the cybersecurity industry. Most market projections say the industry is worth about $180 billion. About 15 percent of that market goes to data security. But all the indications are that we are losing the war in personal identity security That leaves is with the question: Do corporations really care about customer security?
Probably not
US Department of Health and Human Services reported recently that. in the US, there have been 2,213 breaches since 2020, with 152.1M affected individuals. That is almost half of the American population. But that is just breaches involving medical data.
The FBI reports, in the same period, more than 350 million stolen personal information records, exceeding the known population of the country. Worldwide, the number of personal identity information (PII) records exceeds one billion people.
So how bad is it? “I always tell people assume your social security number has been breached. Just assume that,” said John Meyer, senior director for Cornerstone Advisors, an organization providing security consultation to financial organizations.
So we are spending tens of billions of dollars to protect data from exfiltratation on almost a weekly basis from attacks bypassing current defenses. Is it worth the investment? Does protecting that data even matter?
Well, yes… sort of
Data security professionals say it is and it does. Communications, industry intellectual property, state secrets, and control of crucial systems must still be protected. Most professionals we talked to cite ransomware attacks as the primary reason for investing in security precuts and services.
Cyber insurance is big business. However, taking out a cyber insurance policy is not simply a matter of signing on the dotted line and ceasing to worry – there are some important issues to keep front of mind.