Security & Business Resilience

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CEOs cite cybersecurity as the biggest threat to the world economy and as a result, the global spend in cybersecurity is expected to surpass $1 trillion by 2021. An enterprise cyber attack can turn into a catastrophe in a matter of hours, potentially damaging any business at any point in time. As we see from the past few years, the greatest have already fallen.

You are a new Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) in the financial services industry. You are excited about the job but anxious due to the scale of the cyber threat from a range of actors: lone-wolf hackers, organized crime syndicates, governments and their proxies, and insiders. As you think through your game plan for addressing these threats, what’s your most important first step?

Facial recognition systems are an excellent way to improve security and enable touchless access control in buildings and facilities in this new world of social distancing. As experts increasingly recommend face masks to limit the spread of COVID-19, it’s natural to question how this might effect the performance of facial recognition algorithms.

In retail, brick-and-mortar stores experience loss or shrink due to shoplifting, fraud, employee theft and human error. To mitigate against this, many have dedicated loss prevention (LP) personnel who use a variety of tools, including in-store video surveillance systems and point of sale (POS) systems, to deter and investigate theft. But, despite the continued best efforts of LP teams, shrink is on the rise.

In spite of this cyber war and in an effort to be first to market, many companies still rush their products out while ignoring proper security integration during development which can lead to disastrous side effects for businesses. Costing them valuable data, reputation, money and time to amend their product weaknesses. Companies can spend a great deal of time and money developing security patches, repeatedly rolling back and implementing updates, and buying other technologies to secure their own offering. This cycle can potentially continue for years releasing cures to the latest aliments while fearing the next hit. 

Looking back at cybercrime incidents of the past 10 years, only the questions of "if" and "when" remain. "If" a business has no active cybersecurity policy and processes even just hundreds of rich customer records, "when" becomes soon enough. For the past 10 years, at least eight large-scale data breaches per year have trembled economies. You’d imagine that as business owners, we would have learned the immense value of the digital data we hold. The Ponemon Institute says that just in the US, the average size of a data breach is 25,575 records with a cost of $150 per record on average. That could be the money you would have paid in damages, as a government fine, and potentially in customer lawsuits.