Experts comment on a new report that says that business losses to cybercrime data beaches will exceed $5 trillion by 2024, and that cybersecurity breaches will increase nearly 70% over the next five years, says: Jonathan Deveaux, head of enterprise data protection at comforte AG, says: “SMBs are high targets and may feel the brunt of a data breach more than a larger enterprise. One study found that over 60% of small businesses impacted by a data breach will file for bankruptcy or go out of business within 6 months after reporting the incident. The AMCA data breach reported in April 2019 is real-world example of how a company responsible for compromising data from 20 million people filed for Chapter 11 within 3 months following the incident. Due to possible violations of HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), the initial costs of over $4M to inform affected customers and to hire consultants to rectify the breach were too much for the small company to bear, as their employee headcount also dropped from 113 to 25. It is clear that the costs of a data breach are detrimental to a business. However, there is more at stake than monetary costs, including immeasurable brand and trust damage. Having to lay off employees and losing the business altogether is far worse than paying fines and fees. Hopefully business leaders will shift to a ‘security-first’ mindset to adopt stronger, more effective data security methods, which greatly help reduce the risks associated with data breaches.”
Mounir Hahad, head of the Juniper Threat Labs at Juniper Networks (no relation to Juniper Research), says: “Juniper Networks has been predicting that cryptojacking and cryptomining attacks were temporary in nature and closely followed the rise and fall of cryptocurrency valuation and the difficulty of mining. Juniper Research seems to confirm this trend. Furthermore, Juniper Networks predicts that ransomware will continue to rise and remain a sore point in the foreseeable future of cybersecurity. It will morph from crypto-ransomware to other forms of ransomware, as security solutions become more capable at preventing file encryption and easing recovery post-attack. Social media and cloud collaboration tools will continue to provide a fertile ground for new vectors of phishing campaigns, exploiting complex interactions between these platforms and third party applications to expose vulnerabilities or abuse trust relationships.”
Dan Tuchler, CMO at SecurityFirst adds: “Business losses due to data breaches are rapidly increasing. Our customers tell us that their worst nightmare is having to report that a compliance fine has pushed their company stock lower. You don’t get to keep your job if that happens. But in most cases companies don’t have to report a security breach if you can prove your data is encrypted. It’s easy and cost-effective to put basic protection in place on your data, to avoid huge fines and stay out of the daily data breach news.”