Editor’s Note: Ensuring that cyber security measures are cost effective will be a defining challenge for government and corporate leadership.
From: Wall Street Journal/CIO Journal
Michael Hickins, Editor
A new study drastically reducing the total cost of cybercrime to the U.S. to $100 billion might be interesting from an academic perspective, but shouldn’t change how companies think about cybersecurity.
The nonprofit Center for Strategic and International Studies and the computer-security firm McAfee Monday published a major revision of McAfee’s own previous estimate of $1 trillion, which has been cited widely, including by President Barack Obama in a 2009 cybersecurity speech, the Journal’s Siobhan German reports.
But that should bring no comfort to CIOs and CISOs; their companies are just as likely to suffer economic and reputational losses as the result of a breach of their information systems, and are just as likely to lose their jobs in the event of a significant breach. However the number is revised, the volume and persistence of threats has not gone down.
“Attacks are definitely increasing. CIOs should be concerned with advanced threats and thefts of intellectual property,” Gartner security analyst Avivah Litan tells CIO Journal.
Make no mistake – corporate boards are focused on cyber risk as never before. “IT security’s rise from being a functional area to a board level concern is maybe the fastest I’ve ever seen,” Thomas Sanzone, senior vice president of consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. , told CIO Journal earlier this year.
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