Respondents to the Workday survey cited cybersecurity risk as the fourth most pressing risk. There has been no shortage of headline-grabbing attacks in recent years. These range from the 2016 Bangladesh Bank heist, which resulted in the loss of $81 million, to last year’s WannaCry ransomware attack, which affected over 200,000 computers across 150 countries.
For businesses, falling victim to a cyber attack can bring major disruption, huge costs, and reputational damage. Last year, several large multinationals incurred costs running to hundreds of millions of dollars following a series of attacks involving NotPetya malware. Accenture’s 2017 “Cost of Cybercrime Study” found that the global average cost of cybercrime was $11.7 million in 2017, a 27.4 percent increase from the previous year.
However, managing the impact of a potential attack is not always straightforward. A report by BAE Systems, “The Intelligence Disconnect,” revealed an intriguing disconnect when it comes to who is deemed responsible for security breaches: 35 percent of C-Suite respondents said responsibility lay with the IT team, compared to 19 percent of IT decision-makers who felt the same way. As the report points out, “It’s vital that organizations work to narrow these gaps in understanding, intelligence, and responsibility.”