Cyberthreats Are Here to Stay

Cybersecurity and privacy concerns feature in the top five risks CFOs are facing in 2024. From corporations like VF Corp (owner of North Face, Vans, etc.) and Clorox to the healthcare industry and municipalities, organizations fall prey to breaches every day. Many are beefing up cybersecurity, especially since threats this year may be “on steroids” compared to 2023. Adding to the to-do list, the SEC’s new risk disclosure rule for public companies is now in effect, meaning investors will learn which cyber incidents hit home.

Get Cyber Savvy

If you’re in cybersecurity sales, life is looking mighty rosy. Indeed, Fortune published its first annual ranking of the fastest growing cybersecurity startups and anticipated that spending in this arena would reach $330 billion by 2027. Ignoring cybersecurity investments now can be costly later: one survey suggests that the average cost of a data breach in 2023 was $4.45 million, a 15% increase since 2020.

Sadly, cyberattacks are not a matter of “if” but “when.” Examine your vulnerabilities in-house and in your supply chain, especially where large “attack surface” legacy technologies exist. Before closing on any acquisition, conduct a full and independent cybersecurity review to assess risk and remediation. Practice rigor with user permissions and privacy limitations. Engineer redundancies. Regularly convene an incident response team – ideally an interdisciplinary group from finance, IT, and operations – to run tabletop exercises addressing known or anticipated threats, and to develop recovery plans after an attack.

"There are only two types of companies: those that have been hacked, and those that will be.”
–  Robert Mueller, former FBI Director