Page 18 - Security Today, January/February 2019

Tackling the Challenges Understanding the ever-changing threat landscape
BIy Morgan Harris
t should come as no surprise that cybercrime is one of the biggest threats organizations of all shapes and sizes face today. There were purportedly 918 data breaches compromising nearly 2 bil- lion data records in just the first six months of 2017.1 No organi- zation, be it a Fortune 500 company or small business, is beyond
the reach of today’s sophisticated hacker.
Looking at just the financial impact of cybercrime, the average
annualized cost of cybersecurity per enterprise is $11.7 million which represents a 22.7 percent increase over the prior year.2 The same sur- vey reports that the cost of cybercrime tops $17 million per year for organizations in industries like financial services, utilities and energy. With the constantly evolving campaign strategies cybercriminals are adopting like ransomware-as-a-service, it’s no wonder that 87 percent of board members and C-level executives state they lack confidence
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in their organization’s level of cybersecurity preparedness.3
Once a problem to be dealt with by the IT department, the magni- tude of the issue has now made it a top priority for every part of an organization including the traditional security operations team. The line between the traditional security or loss prevention department handling physical security to protect a company’s brick and mortar assets and the IT department looking after its digital ones has started to blur. While the threats to our brick and mortar assets probably hasn’t changed much over the past several decades, the threats to our
digital or virtual ones certainly has.
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was much talk
about the convergence of physical and digital security as IP-enabled devices started to come onto the scene. That convergence was never fully realized in the manner that industry experts thought should or
CYBERSECURITY
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