Even Though 9 in 10 Firms Breached, Few Worried About Future Incidents

Lloyd’s of London released a study that said while 92% of firms have been breached, only 42% are worried that they will be breached again in the future.

Either, this means that those 92% learned an incredible lesson and completely changed the way that they run their businesses as a result of being breached ….. or, perhaps, they are deluding themselves.

Which do you think is right?

Some other statistics from the study.

Only 13% think they will lose business as a result of a breach.  Ask Tillage Commodities, who last week shut down as a result of a breach.  Or ask Yahoo, who is already losing customers as a result of their announcement of a two year old breach.  Ask the Yahoo investors who will likely get less money as a result of the breach – because the cost of paying for the breach will come out of the proceeds of the sale – and possibly the sale price will change.

The EU General Data Protection Regulation goes into effect next year.  The EU GDPR requires very strong privacy protections for companies that do business in Europe, no matter where the the companies themselves are located.  97% of the respondents said that they have HEARD about it but only 7% say that they know a great deal about it.  For companies that do business in the EU, the GDPR will have a major impact on them in the next 12 months or so, so not knowing much about it could get very expensive.  57% said they know little or nothing about it.

Only a little over half – 58% were aware of the fact that they could be penalized up to 4% of the annual revenue – not profit – in situations where they violated that law.

Amazingly, 42% said the loss of paper with information on it was the biggest risk.  Really?  Do they think that hackers from China snuck into America, broke into Lockheed Martin and stole the paper plans for the F-35 Fighter airplane.  I don’t think that is the way it happened.  Maybe I am wrong.

The report concludes that maybe businesses figure that they have already lost the war and are waiting to be executed by the cyber red-army.

That sounds like a pretty defeatist attitude and one that I am not willing to give into.

Information for this post came from Business Reporter.

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