More than four in ten, 44 percent of security people would rather have root canal surgery than make the ‘walk of shame’ to the boardroom to explain that they’ve suffered a data breach. That’s according to a survey of 326 information security visitors to the Infosecurity Europe 2017 conference, from June 6 to 8, at Olympia in London, by a malware product company, Lastline.
Brian Laing, Senior VP of Products at Lastline said: “The fact that nearly half of cyber security professionals would prefer to undergo a painful dental procedure than face their board about a data breach just shows how seriously these attacks affect organisations today. On a more positive note, it does show that cyber security has risen up the board’s agenda,” he added.
As the IT security product firm says, this follows a year of unprecedented data loss by organisations at the hands of cybercriminals, including the biggest data breach ever recorded, whereby the user account information of about one billion Yahoo! users was posted for sale on the ‘dark web’.
Laing said: “It is right to dread a data breach. It isn’t simply the breach itself that can be so damaging for both organisations and consumers, but the further criminality it facilitates. Every breach reveals data that criminals can use to launch additional attacks, either by the initial attackers or other criminals to whom they sell the compromised data. They merge data from multiple sources, building dossiers on potential victims, including spear phishing targets inside corporations. Data breaches provide a distribution hub for malware for years to come.”
