For most organizations figuring a cybersecurity budget is often a mix of emotion and guesswork. A recent Gartner report shows most companies spend between 1% and 13% of their IT budget on cybersecurity, with the average at 5.6%. However, calculating cybersecurity budget as a proportion of the IT budget is [...]
You may think that your startup is all but invisible to criminals due to its small size. However, according to the 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report shared by Verizon, these kinds of attacks are opportunistic. Criminals targeting startups may be banking on the fact that security measures haven’t yet been [...]
If you have cyber insurance, excellent! Now, you need to be sure you understand what your contract covers and more importantly what it doesn’t cover. In the event of a breach, you want to make sure you have questions like this answered well beforehand, along with questions like, what PR [...]
In April of 2018, Utah-based company HealthEquity reported 23,000 accounts were compromised in a data breach when an employee fell for a phishing scheme. As a result of human error, information like employee names, deduction amounts and social security numbers were exposed. The HealthEquity breach is hardly an isolated incident [...]
Gone are the days that cybersecurity can be relegated to the IT department; it is now a C-suite and board issue that requires corporate wide attention. By asking the right questions and following a risk-based roadmap for prevention and response, executives can better protect their companies, customers & shareholders. Some [...]
“I am convinced that there are only two types of companies: those that have been hacked and those that will be. And even they are converging into one category: companies that have been hacked and will be hacked again.” - FBI Director Robert Mueller
The average cost of a data breach rose 6.4% year-over-year to about $3.9 million in 2018, according to research sponsored by IBM Security and conducted by the Ponemon Institute. The average cost for each lost record rose to $148 from $141, an increase of 4.8% from 2017, while the average [...]
When considering expenses related to ransomware demands that could possibly impact an organization, it is important to understand that related costs like: forensic specialists, negotiators, breach coaches, legal and public relations professionals may be more expensive than the actual ransom demanded. Not to mention the expenses associated with regulatory costs, [...]
When educating a younger audience (or any audience in the world of cybersecurity), remember everything in cybersecurity begins and ends with the understanding that if you have data, then you have cyber risk. If your audience truly does not believe their data is at risk, your lesson will fall on [...]
According to a recent study, the problem with the Cybersecurity skills gap is only getting worse. 2014: 23 percent of respondents claimed their organization had a problematic shortage of cybersecurity skills 2015: 25 percent of respondents claimed their organization had a problematic shortage of cybersecurity skills 2016: 46 percent of [...]