Breaches plague organisations on an almost daily basis. How is the bombardment impacting society and indeed, cyber security itself?
Data breaches continue to be reported on an almost daily basis, with serious, costly and frankly embarrassing consequences for organisations affected.
So regular do breach incidents occur that media publications, save those that specialise in cyber security, simply don’t have the capacity to report on them all.
Midway through 2019, Norton released a breach report demonstrating the astonishing escalation of breaches. The cyber security company revealed there had been 3,800 publicly disclosed breaches in the first six months of the year, a 54 percent increase compared to the first six months of 2018. Try reporting on all of those.
Just like all areas of business, cyber hackers are embracing “digital transformation” and its rich rewards, using readily accessible tools to open the doors left open by unsuspecting digital users. It is a cliche to compare the digitally-evolved present with the past, but who 20 years ago could have predicted that breach trading would one day be the world’s fastest-growing black market?
The new decade has picked up where 2019 left off. At the time of writing, the Iranian state has breached the website of a US government agency, foreign currency exchange Travelex is reckoning with a malware attack that forced the company to take its UK website offline, and Seattle-based smart home company Wyze exposed the data of its 2.4 million users via an unprotected database.
Most discussions around breaches understandably focus on the material effects of individual incidents on companies and their users — whether that’s fines, lasting reputational damage, or increased risk of fraud — and the practical steps organisations can employ to prevent them from becoming tomorrow’s headline.
At Cloud and Cyber Security Expo, at ExCeL London March 11, Becky Pinkard, CISO at Aldermore bank, will present a more macro perspective. In a preview of her talk on the show’s website, Pinkard, a cyber security veteran of two decades, asks “how is this frequency increase impacting society and indeed, security itself?”
“We have gotten to the point where people basically subscribe to the fact that their data will be breached,” she says.
Breach normalisation
The topic of breach normalisation has been examined heavily before, but most of the discussion has centred around its obvious, negative effect – the desensitisation and numbing of society to each passing incident.