Business has a new battleground. The foes aren’t competitors, but they are silent intruders beating at the doors of virtually every organization. They are cyber-criminals seeking to steal valuable or private data, extort money, impair the operation of a business or simply create havoc. The costs of security breaches often reach the millions of dollars.
As much as today’s always-connected, highly-mobile, data-intensive world is a boon for business, it is also a fertile breeding ground for cyber-criminals. Techniques such as malware attachments, drive-by downloads, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, ransomware, keyloggers and screen grabbers, along with social engineering tactics such as phishing are increasingly commonplace.
Yet these breaches often catch businesses completely by surprise, regardless of what may appear to be sophisticated approaches to cybersecurity. And too many organizations lack an effective response when a cyberattack does occur.
Real damage in real dollars
For many enterprises, especially those that have yet to sustain a major cyber event, the idea of damage from an attack may seem abstract and distant. However, statistics such as the following tell us the damage is real, in real dollars:
- Breach: The average cost of a data breach suffered in 2016 by 27 Canadian companies was $5.78 million, or $255 per lost or stolen record. (Source)
- Recovery: Canadian companies are paying thousands of dollars a day to recover from a cyber-attack. One Canadian company paid $425,000 to recover from a ransomware attack. (Source)
The answer? No network or device can be impervious to attack, but the best protection stems from an intelligent approach to the incident response lifecycle, from preparing defenses to effective remediation strategies to constant learning and improvement.
The ISA white paper “Cybersecurity Wake-Up Call: A 6-Step Approach to Pro-active Incident Response Can Avoid Catastrophic Results for Business” explores an exploding cyber-threat landscape as well as the startling growth of multiple types of cyber-attacks. The paper also presents a six-step approach to incident readiness and response. Read the white paper now.
