Cybersecurity: Five Guiding Principles For Boards

Data breaches and cyber-attacks continue to represent important threats to businesses of all shapes and sizes. High-profile data breaches have prompted heightened regulatory, shareholder, and public scrutiny of boardroom preparedness. While the importance of cybersecurity at the Board level may be obvious, it is often difficult to translate that awareness into concrete steps that should be taken.

The Threat

Cyber criminals target organizations for many reasons and through different means. However, their motivation for doing so is often very simple: making easy money. They rely on hacks, data viruses, scams, skimming, data sharing by disgruntled employees and data farming as means to either extort payment from organizations or sell the stolen data on the "dark web". The data they steal can range from customer and employee information, to intellectual property (including trade secrets, business plans, source code, etc.), and other confidential information.