Why is Cyber Security the Top Level Priority for Any Organizations?

In the last few decades, Technology has reached heights which no one would have predicted. The Internet has become the most valuable asset on the planet. Everything is connected through the internet and Cyber Security becomes Top Level Priority for Any Organizations.

However, the booming of technology has given us a great life as well as a great threat. As we come across a vast increase in technology to overcome our daily basic needs, there are also tremendous amounts of risks we have to embark on. Threat actors are learning new technologies to carry out more sophisticated attacks that an organization may rarely recognize.  

 For an organization, their most important concern is “information”. Protecting the leakage of information from cyber-attacks has been seemingly increasing every year. An estimated 16 billion records were lost in data breaches of 2019.

The first quarter of 2020 has lost almost 8 billion records so far. Many organizations have realized the importance of cybersecurity and have implemented several security measures to protect against a cyber-attack.

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There are many reasons for an organization to give top priority to Cybersecurity. Some of them are,

1. Reputation
2. Confidential Data
3. Intellectual Property
4. Lawsuits
5. Monetary Loss

Reputation

Cyber-attacks reduce trust in the company or organization. Since a data breach may expose thousands of confidential private data of customers resulting in the breaking of trust in the company.

An audit reported that nearly 87% of the customers are ready to move on from the company products whenever a Data breach occurs. Also, Further products/services from the company will lose its value in the future. Companies give great importance to Cybersecurity in the first place.

On the other hand, a Data Breach is the worst thing they probably don't want to hear about! A reputation once lost cannot be regained.

Many companies store records of consumer’s private data like Social Security Numbers, Bank account details, medical records, and many other data for their use. With this much personal information on their database, it becomes their sole responsibility to protect these data from a Data breach at any cost.

Since these are highly confidential data, a data breach may result in a huge loss of money as well as the loss of data that cannot be restored easily. 70% of attacks were targeted on organizations that keep records of customers' private details.

This increases an organization’s concern highly towards Cyber Security and hence they spend millions of dollars on cybersecurity.

Almost all organizations have R&D teams. With the evolution of technology and consumer needs, every organization is developing something new every year to gain more customer base.

Many research products solve problems on a large scale for customers. Since we live in a completely digital world, storing intellectual property data on a piece of paper is long gone.

Computers hold every potential data for any organization or for an individual.  This makes it easier for cybercriminals to steal intellectual property data. A single loss of IP data might result in a billion-dollar loss for an organization.

Proper implementation of cybersecurity might prevent intellectual property loss for an organization. A report said that nearly $48 billion dollar was lost due to Intellectual property theft by Chinese APT Hackers which resulted in the loss of 1 Million U.S Jobs.

Law Suits

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) has implemented several law-suits based on cybersecurity. One of them is article 83, which has 2 categories of fines.

1. A fine of up to 2% of the company’s revenue or €1 million can be made for data loss.
2. A much severe fine of up to 4% of the company’s revenue or €20 Million can be made for data loss.

The article also has a much higher fine of up to €100 Million for highly confidential data loss. No organization will ever want to face such higher fines for a data breach. With the loss of data, intellectual property, and higher fines a company will face its worst nightmare if this is not prevented. This makes all the organizations keep their focus high on Cyber Security policies.

Monetary Loss

All of the above losses point directly towards the main loss which is the monetary loss of the company. An organization with high monetary loss is more likely to reach the ground sooner or later.

Investing in Cybersecurity has become a much higher priority of all the organizations since the investment in the Cybersecurity measures will cost much lower than the data loss or the fine they will face if not invested in Cyber Security. By the end of 2020, nearly $6 Trillion is estimated to be spent on cybersecurity by organizations worldwide creating at least 1 million new cybersecurity jobs.

Cybersecurity has not just been practiced by private companies and organizations but is also a major concern for Public and Government sectors. 16% of the targeted sectors were Public in 2019.

23000 incidents were registered with 320 breaches confirmed. In 2015, nearly 190 million U.S voter details were exposed which was recorded the largest data breach on any government organization.

Most Common type of Organization Based Attacks Cyber-Attacks

3. DDoS –Distributed Denial of Service is a type of attack in which hackers send multiple requests to a server from Bots that results in taking down the server for a particular period of time.
4. Ransomware – Ransomware attack does not delete or steal data from the organization instead, it encrypts the files making them unreadable. Threat actors then demand a huge ransom in order to decrypt the files. This is one of the biggest threats an organization should prevent.
5. Phishing emails – 90% of the attacks are easier when it comes to exploiting human links. Threat actors gather information about a particular individual in an organization and send unsolicited emails indicating something that person would soon respond to. This makes it easier to infiltrate an organization. Malware files can also be sent through phishing emails.

 Conclusion

Cyber Security is Top Level Priority as it becomes the most important aspect of almost all businesses. Preventing cyber threats is not going to be easy for any organization. With perfect experts on cybersecurity and proper implementation of security measures can make any organization defend against cyber threats.