The Three Elements of Cyber Security

What problem costs $1.6 million, takes 170 days to discover, and requires 45 days to fix? Give up? It’s the average cyber-attack on a business.

Digital Lock Symbolic of Secure Data on the Internet

Is cyber security too expensive? An effective cybersecurity initiative that costs at least a dollar less than $1.6 million is, by definition, cheaper than the alternative. End of discussion. What about the 170 days that a cyber-attack can go undetected? That’s 24 weeks! For comparison, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says that, as of September 2016, the median job search takes 10.3 weeks. That means you could lose your job, find a new one, lose that job, and find a new one all in the time it takes for the average organization to discover its network has been breached.

I didn’t pick the duration of the median job search at random. Among small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), 60% go out of business within six months of being victimized by a cyber-attack. So if you work at an SMB that is attacked, when you detect the intrusion 170 days later and then spend 45 days fixing it, you still have a 60% chance of losing your job, regardless of whether you work at the bottom of the organization or the top.

To protect yourself against cyber crime, you need to work on three elements of your business.

1. Technology
2. Policy
3. People

Read more about The Three Elements of Cyber Security published by Bill Rosenthal
on the Logical Operations Blog!

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