The Cyber Threat Landscape Will Get Worse Before (and if) it Gets Better!
Based on the three “headline news” articles below, I believe no one organization can prevent a data breach event:
- FBI, CISA warn of impending ransomware attacks on hospitals
- Security Experts Alarmed By Broken Cyber Market
- We are outnumbered – cybersecurity pros face a huge staffing shortage as attacks surge during the pandemic
To prove this point, while the total number of data breaches was down in the first six months of 2020, over 27 billion records have been exposed so far this year (please see here) which is more than four times higher than any previously reported equivalent time period.
This leads me to believe two things:
- All the financial and IT resources of the U.S. government and private industry – no organization can prevent a data breach.
- Cyber threats and attacks are no longer just a technology risk – but a business and consumer risk.
So what can be done?
We need to create a new security culture with a new sense of urgency for both business and consumers.
If you are a business and you are not proactively monitoring the ongoing risk associated with cyber threats and attacks across your entire enterprise, including the Board/C-Suite level, you’re putting the viability of your business in serious jeopardy and creating liability by not adequately protecting your business assets along with your customer information.
And if you are a consumer – especially with employees working from home and students studying remotely – and you are not proactively monitoring your and your family members’ Personally Identifiable Information (PII), then you are increasing your risk to hackers and online scammers especially during the COVID crisis.
As the cyber threat landscape gets worse and COVID working environment changes, employers and consumers become more reliant on technology. We need to have a plan to respond and recover from a data breach and/or identity theft event.
When life is perfect and there are no data breach and identity theft events, we can relax. Unfortunately, life is not perfect. Recent FBI cybersecurity warnings reveal, a broken cybersecurity market, and a shortage of cybersecurity workers, we need to be careful.
So an important question to ask the organization you work for is what is the formal response and recovery plan that is in place in the event of a data breach or hacking event?
And as an individual consumer, the question to ask yourself is, are you doing everything you can to protect yourself and your family members against hackers and online scammers?
By Mark Pribish
Vice President and ID Theft Practice Leader
More Articles here: ID Theft Criminals Never Rest, Online Students are Targeted, Fraud in the Midst of COVID-19
