How to Reduce Your Company’s Susceptibility to Hacking
Thinking before the attack not abou the aftermath
By Zack Schuler, founder and CEO of NINJIO
When most people think about cybercrime, they think about headlines: data breaches that affect
hundreds of millions of customers, crippling financial losses for companies, and outraged lawmakers
interrogating CEOs in front of the cameras. In other words, they think about the aftermath of cyberattacks
instead of the attacks to come.
While this is understandable for the average consumer, it’s far less defensible for the companies that are
at ever-greater risk of being hacked. Too many companies are reactive instead of proactive about
cybersecurity – according to PwC’s 2018 Global State of Information Security Survey, less than half of
respondents have adopted preventive security measures such as vulnerability and threat assessments.
Similarly, the second-most-cited vulnerability in the 2018- 2019 EY Global Information Security Survey is
“outdated security controls.”
Meanwhile, the number of attacks continues to rise: Since 2014, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint
Center (IC3) has received more than 1.5 million complaints, and the number has increased every year
(from under 270,000 in 2014 to more than 350,000 in 2018). Losses over this four-year period totaled
almost $7.5 billion. Other data reflect these findings – according to the 2019 Cost of Cybercrime Study
by Accenture and the Ponemon Institute, the average number of security breaches increased from 130
in 2017 to 145 in 2018, while the average cost of each incident jumped from $11.7 million to $13 million.
This glimpse at the state of cybersecurity in the United States isn’t promising – even though attacks are
becoming more frequent and more costly, companies’ cybersecurity platforms aren’t keeping pace.