Consumers tolerate breaches, European Union may get tougher on hacking and a holiday shopping warning
Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Monday October 22nd. To hear the podcast, click on the arrow below:
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Cyber security and privacy experts often warn organizations that one of the fall-outs of a data breach is loss of brand reputation, and possible loss of sales. However, a new U.S. study suggests consumers there will still trust a brand after a breach, as long as they are immediately told about the attack and how the company is responding. The survey of 1,000 Americans by Janrain, which makes identity access management solutions, showed 42 per cent of respondents would be at least open to forgiving a brand that was hit by a breach. Seven per would refuse to forgive, with an additional 14 per cent saying they would lose all faith in an organization’s ability to protect their data if there was a breach. There’s some evidence to support this: Sony, Home Depot. Target, eBay and Uber suffered big data breaches and are still in business. But public tolerance for breaches isn’t unlimited. Sixty-six per cent of survey respondents said they want the U.S. to adopt rules to provide customers with greater privacy, security and control of their personal data.
On the other hand a lot of people are cynical. Twelve per cent of respondents said they have given up worrying about their computer/mobile security, because they believe hackers can break into company networks anyway. That’s bad – they’re the ones who will be hacked and host malware that gets spread to others.
European Union countries are getting tired of cyber attacks. SecurityWeek reports that at a meeting last week they agreed to work together to set up a sanctions regime to hit back by freezing assets of attackers that are held in their countries, and to ban them from traveling there. The proposal comes after an attempt this month to hack the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. The idea still need formal approval.
Finally, as part of Cyber Security Awareness Month I’m passing on tips to listeners. It’s not too early to think about holiday shopping, so it’s also not too early to think about ways criminals want to sucker you. One way is to set up phony web sites that look almost exactly like a legitimate online retailers’ site. Or they may set up a link within a real web site so when you go to pay for your products, you get transferred to a phony but similar site. What criminals want to steal your credit card numbers and passwords. When shopping and paying look carefully at the URL or Web site address you’re on. If it looks strange, you can copy and paste in into a URL checker, like Google Safe Browsing, to check it out. And if you find a phony site, make sure you report it to the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security or the Anti-Phishing Working Group.
That’s it for Cyber Security Today. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing. Thanks for listening. I’m Howard Solomon