Cyber Threat Mitigation Strategies - Can They Succeed?

Advances in IT security are continuing to cause headaches for today’s cyber criminals, yet as a new breed of increasingly savvy hackers emerge, exposure to a variety of threats remains a fact of life for most organizations across the globe. 

Without appropriate security measures in place, companies are facing the risk of data breaches, loss of employee productivity, damage to brand reputation and non-compliance, leading to potentially severe fines. Malware is constantly evolving, with millions of forms of malware being released every year. In fact, McAfee catalogs over 100,000 new malware samples a day (69 per minute). With that, successful cyber-attacks have risen 20 percent year on year, with the average cost of cybercrime standing at over $7m dollars a year. Increasingly, threats faced by enterprises are coming from the inside as well as the outside. Recent headlines have been dominated by stories of data theft driven by maverick insiders. Details of the most high profile event, the notorious breach by Edward Snowden at the NSA, continue to emerge over a year later. With research commissioned by the UK BIS finding that 84% of data breach incidents are caused by staff, business leaders must be prepared for the risks associated by insiders gaining access to corporate information. Can such strategies succeed in preventing or at least mitigating against cyber threats? Send your comments to the Cloud and Cyber Security Center.