Four of the five largest data breaches of all time have happened in the past few years. The biggest, Yahoo, was upgraded in 2016 when it was announced that the breach, originally estimated to affect 1 billion accounts, actually exposed all 3 billion accounts. No. 4 on the list is the attack that captured 145 million data accounts from credit bureau Equifax. This doesn’t even count cybercrimes, like the organizations in 150 countries that were ransomed by the WannaCry hack.
Source: CSO Online
In a survey by KPMG, about 1 in 5 shoppers said they would completely stop visiting a retailer if they learned about a breach, and 1 in 3 said they would just take a break from shopping there for an unspecified amount of time. Yet over the past year, consumers have seen massive, successful cyberattacks on popular brands like Delta, Best Buy, Saks Fifth Avenue and Whole Foods, among many others. The scope of the problem has grown to be so overwhelming that both consumers and businesses are desperate to find partners they can trust with their data.
We are living in an Age of Disruption, which has both positive and negative aspects. The positive is the value creation by innovative concepts and business models, but the flip side of that is that technology is enabling malicious online actors who can do more damage faster than ever before.
The keys to staying ahead of cybercriminals and differentiating from competitors in the Age of Disruption turns out to be determined by a single path: proving that the organization can act as a trustworthy steward of stakeholder data.
Here are some actions that a future-proofing organization can and should take as soon as possible:
Despite $96 billion that will be spent on cybersecurity this year, private data is still being exposed, and trillions have been siphoned off by malicious actors online. Financial loss due to cybercrime is on track to double by 2021, up to a $6 trillion drag on the world’s business community. In the years ahead, as brands compete increasingly on providing the best customer experience, one of the key elements of that experience will be stewardship of customer data.
Leading organizations can take great strides in protecting themselves, their partners and their customers by:
Cybercrime is not going away, and the streamlining of technology will make it easier for more people as time goes on. While successful organizations will always be a prime target for malicious actors, they can count on security-minded partners to think a few steps ahead and put preventative tech in place to minimize or eliminate these threats.