Cloud breaches continue to riddle organizations’ threat landscape, with misconfigured cloud storage services and poor security practices leading to more than 200 breaches in the past two years, according to the latest Accurics report.
Businesses are struggling to develop cyber resilience to fend off attacks as they seek to create flawless operations and to scale systems. Efficient cybersecurity in an advancing digital economy is no easy goal, as many factors are at play, including third-party risks and increased attack surface, as a result of extensive interest in IoT deployments. This is why corporates and governments need to work together to set up priorities to help enable digital transformation and build trust through proper safeguards on consumer data privacy.
Anthem, the second-largest health insurer in the US, will pay $16 million to the US Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights following a data breach that exposed the electronic protected health information (ePHI) of almost 80 million people. Anthem will also initiate a corrective action plan to include thorough risk analysis and regular reporting.
Insider threats are nothing to joke about -- they are a real danger to companies worldwide, who often neglect them. In fact, they rank among the top six threats of 2018, according to statistics. A company will spend at least $8 million yearly on insider threats, the Ponemon Institute has found.
The headlines love to talk about sophisticated hacking gangs, exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities to break their way into businesses and steal corporate data.
Critical national infrastructures such as the energy sector, public transportation, commercial facilities, government and defense, and medical services, among others, have been under attack in recent years, following a large volume of security vulnerabilities and a lack of encryption.
Enterprises are at risk now more than ever because it seems they keep falling behind on infrastructure security, while hackers are more vigilant and sophisticated in their schemes. Researchers can’t really put their finger on what it is exactly that causes more damage –insider threats, targeted attacks or plain old outdated software, but one thing is certain: by 2023, more than 146 billion records will be leaked following security breaches, according to Juniper Research.
Data breaches not only cost companies millions, but they also inflict reputational damage, customer turnover and operational costs. The average cost of a data breach has risen 6.4% to a global average of $3.86 million this year, according to research from the Ponemon Institute.
With speech recognition and voice-activated personal assistants slowly making their move into the corporate world, companies will have to adjust their security and digital strategies, infrastructure and customer interactions.
2018 appears to be the year of regulatory compliance, threatening to hinder all IT initiatives and projects. Whether it’s The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), the banking sector’s PSD2 (Revised Payment Service Directive), NIST for federal agencies or the EU’s boogey-man - Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), organizations worldwide are struggling to meet all industry-specific guidelines and recommendations to avoid substantial fines following an incident.
Companies still struggle with ransomware, phishing, data breaches and other attacks that bypass their security and affect their budgets. Enterprises know they are in dire need of technology that will safeguard their infrastructures from known, unknown, and undisclosed vulnerabilities.
Security executives fear cyberattacks will heavily target critical infrastructures in the near future, but they don’t seem to be doing much about enforcing security policies that also cover IoT devices. Despite the major threat they pose, connected devices have so far been overlooked in security policies. It appears that in general, in spite of the increasing awareness of high-profile cyberattacks and threats, enterprises tend to look the other way rather than invest properly in a cybersecurity strategy.
