Category Archives: Cyber Crime

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Cyberbreach and Reputation Woes Hack Away at Bottom Line for 44% of Financial Firms

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According to the 2015 Makovsky Wall Street Reputation Study, released Thursday, 42% of U.S. consumers believe that failure to protect personal and financial information is the biggest threat to the reputation of the financial firms they use. What’s more, three-quarters of respondents said that the unauthorized access of their personal and financial information would likely lead them to take their business elsewhere. In fact, security of personal and financial information is much more important to customers compared to a financial services firm’s ethical responsibility to customers and the community (23%).

Executives from financial services firms seem to know this already: 83% agree that the ability to combat cyber threats and protect personal data will be one of the biggest issues in building reputation in the next year.

The study found that this trend is already having a very real impact: 44% of financial services companies report losing 20% or more of their business in the past year due to reputation and customer satisfaction issues. When asked to rank the issues that negatively affected their company’s reputation over the last 12 months, the top three “strongly agree” responses in 2015 from communications, marketing and investor relations executives at financial services firms were:

  • Financial performance (47%), up from 27% in 2014
  • Corporate governance (45%), up from 24% in 2014
  • Data breaches (42%), up from 24% in 2014

Earning consumer trust will take some extraordinary effort, as a seemingly constant stream of breaches in the news and personal experiences have clearly made customers more skeptical of data security across a range of industries. When asked which institution they trust more with their personal information and safeguarding privacy, today’s consumers ranked traditional financial institutions—including insurers—higher by a wide margin over new online providers, but a larger percentage of consumers do not trust any organization to be able to protect their data:

  • Bank/brokerage, insurance, or credit card company (33%)
  • U.S. Government (IRS, Social Security) or U.S. Postal Service (13%)
  • Current healthcare company (4%)
  • Online wallets (PayPal, Google Wallet, Apple Pay) (4%)
  • Retail chain or small businesses (4%)
  • All other (3%)
  • None of these organizations or companies can be trusted (39%)

 

Travelers Stages Live Hack to Examine Realities of Cyberrisk

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NEW YORK—Yesterday, Travelers hosted “Hacked: The Implications of a Cyber Breach,” a panel of the insurer’s top experts and outside consultants drilling down into the realities of the cyber threat.

According to Travelers’ brand new 2015 Business Risk Index, cybersecurity rose from the #5 threat in 2014 to the #2 threat perceived by business leaders, with 55% most concerned about malicious and criminal attacks.

In an exercise to show just how valid that concern it is, panelists Kurt Oestreicher, a member of the cyber fraud investigative services team at Travelers, and Chris Hauser, former Silicon Valley FBI agent and current member of the cyber fraud investigative services team at Travelers, successfully carried out a live hack. Using a fake website created for this demonstration, the experts staged an SQL injection attack—the same kind of attack as Heartbleed, these are still responsible for 97% of breaches. Using an open-source penetration testing program that Hauser described as “point and click hacking,” they easily found a way to tunnel into the site’s SQL database. The process of scanning for vulnerabilities and acting on a known exploit—in other words, conducting the actual, successful “hack”—took about two minutes, including the time Hauser spent talking the audience through the process.

The program used to conduct this hack was free, and the number of resources readily available for free or very low cost means that more everyday businesses will become victims as malicious actors face very few obstacles to attempt a hack. “As tools and techniques like this become more common, it becomes far easier to target small- and medium-sized businesses and that exposure increases, especially because there are such low costs up front,” said Oestreicher.

Every day in the United States, 34,529 of these known computer security incidents take place. Yet many go undetected, and a lot are willfully unreported. While larger breaches impact more records, the preponderance of breaches strike Main Street businesses, not Wall Street corporations. In fact, of those that are identified and reported, 62% of breaches impact small and medium-sized businesses, Travelers found. Increased awareness among this group has yet to translate into increased coverage, however. According to a survey by Software Advice, insurance penetration among this group hovers at just over 2%, a trend Mullen has seen in the field as well. “Only about 10% of those who should have that coverage actually do,” he said.

According to data from NetDiligence, those incidents that are covered by insurance break down as follows:

NetDiligence Cyberinsurance Claims by Business Sector

NetDiligence Cyberinsurance Claims by Data Type

With hefty fines, costly investigation and notification requirements, and possible lawsuits and class actions, the true costs rapidly spiral. According to Mark Greisiger, president of data breach crisis services and security practices company NetDiligence, the average cost of a breach is $733,000 for SMBs—before any possible lawsuits or fines. Per record, the cost ranges from 1 cent to $1,000, based on the type of information contained. The average legal settlement after such breaches is currently about $550,000. Yet these numbers primarily reflect incidents where insurance was in place. Without the trusted vendor agreements, for example, the cost of retaining forensic investigation services in the midst of a crisis can be up to three times higher, he reported.

Recovering from these incidents varies wildly by the type of records exposed, and the resources available to aid in the effort. “It’s a wild pain in the butt with insurance,” said breach coach John Mullen, a managing partner of the Philadelphia Regional Office and chair of the U.S. Data Privacy and Network Security Group at Lewis Brisbois Brisgaad & Smith. “Without insurance, it’s a small- and medium-sized business killer. The Main Street story is a $2 million bill and no business.”

In the 2015 Business Risk Index, Travelers also shared a more detailed view of preparedness among specific industries:

Business Risk Index Cyber Preparedness

Tips for Preventing Virtual Shoplifters

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E-commerce business models have many advantages over brick-and-mortar retailers, including lower overhead, more flexibility in product and price testing, and more opportunities to manage inventory at optimal levels based on shopper behavior and current web analytics. However, an e-commerce business can’t escape all the realities of merchants with physical storefronts—including shoplifters.

Here are six tips for preventing virtual shoplifters:

Safeguard your platform. An open-source e-commerce platform could make you more vulnerable to hackers. Ensure that you host your site with a platform that uses object-oriented programing language. Ideally, the administrative portions of your site should be completely inaccessible to anyone outside of your organization.

Maximize your SSL strategy. Use of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates have become commonplace in online transactions that involve sensitive data. As Rick Andrews from Symantec recently advised in a CIO Magazine article, however, their opportunities can be further maximized—and it may even translate into conversion improvements at customer checkout. “Integrate the stronger EV SSL [Extended Validation Secure Sockets Layer], URL green bar and SSL security seal so customers know that your website is safe,” Andrews said.

Additionally, mandate consistent business processes to ensure someone in your company is tasked with staying abreast of the latest changes in the world of online security, and keeping systems current in light of them. In mid-April, for example, the Payment Card Industry Standards Security Council (PCI SSI) announced it found vulnerabilities in the current SSL and TLC (Transport Layer Security) methodologies, exposed in part by Heartbleed and Poodle. Although merchants have until June 30, 2016 to revise their SSL protocol to remain PCI compliant, a business is vulnerable to hackers who are well aware of the opportunities to take advantage of such security “holes,” until the security updates are in place.

Follow PCI compliance standards. In addition to incorporating PCI-compliant secure payment gateways into your e-commerce site to process transactions, confirm that you aren’t storing sensitive customer data (also prohibited by PCI standards)—even if you do so to streamline return procedures.

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While it may extend the length of your checkout and return processes slightly, what your business stands to lose in the form of risk exposure due to stored sensitive data outweighs potential efficiency gains.

Verify card information with addresses. Although e-commerce transactions inherently include “card not present” scenarios, you can still take steps to reduce the risk of fraudulent transactions. Implement address verification systems to detect potential information discrepancies between card information and the customer. Require that the customer input security information shown on the physical card, like the three- or four-digit card verification on the back or front of the card (in the case of American Express).

Set alerts—and pay attention to them.

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Security alerts can detect suspicious activity before it spirals into a full-scale cybertheft—but only if you take them seriously. In the case of the Target data breach, Bloomberg reported that the merchant’s security alerts did sense suspicious activity well before the data breach was underway, but that the threats weren’t taken seriously by technology staff. At minimum, every e-commerce business should have alerts to detect unusually high activity originating from a single IP address, and to flag customers who order multiple times using different cards, in a short period of time.

Install “patches” as soon as they are available.  Your software and operating systems are only secure if they’re current. When new versions of software are released, install them as soon as possible—and immediately, if the update involves a patch developed because a vulnerability was detected.

If you operated a brick-and-mortar business you wouldn’t leave your cash registers unattended or doors unlocked after business hours—but gaps in online security are akin to doing just that when you have an e-commerce business.

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Establish processes and security procedures to ensure that you remain aware of changes in security standards, potential threats and areas of vulnerability. While you may not stop virtual shoplifters and fraudulent transactions entirely, optimizing your site security is your best line of defense.

Malware Threats from Unlicensed Software: The Critical First Step for Cyberrisk Management

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Waking up to find your company on the front page news and at the center of a data breach is every CEO’s worst nightmare—and for a number of businesses, it has become reality. Today, the threats from cybercrime are real and frightening, and the risks are extraordinary. Cybersecurity is an incredibly complex issue and business leaders are grappling with how to best protect their businesses, understand the new business vulnerabilities, and identify what steps they can take to protect themselves and their customers from becoming a victim of cybercrime.

There is a strong case for organizations to put protection from malware at the top of their risk agenda. In the past year, 43% of companies experienced a data breach. The average organization experiences a malware event every three minutes, and the costs of dealing with that malware can be astronomical. The International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that enterprises spent $491 billion in 2014 as a result of malware associated with counterfeit and unlicensed software.

A threshold step to mitigating risk is gaining an understanding of your own network and if the software you are using is genuine and fully licensed. Unfortunately, many businesses are failing to take this basic and critical first step to protect themselves.

It has long been suspected that there is a connection between unlicensed software and cybersecurity threats. A new study commissioned by BSA | The Software Alliance and conducted by IDC confirms this as fact.

The study compared rates of unlicensed software installed on PCs with a measure of malware incidents on PCs across 81 countries. Given that 43% of the software installed on PCs globally in 2014 was unlicensed, it’s clear that many businesses are at risk. The findings were sobering. The correlation between the use of unlicensed software and malware is even higher than the correlations between education and income, or that between smoking and lung cancer. The implication for governments, enterprises and consumers is clear: assessing what is in your network and eliminating unlicensed software could help reduce the risk of cybersecurity incidents.

Fortunately there are proven best practices available to tackle the challenges around software licensing.  The world class standard for Software Asset Management is ISO/IEC 19770-1:2012.

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The importance of implementing internal controls for legal use of technology, including software, has become so critical that COSO now recommends it in its revised Internal Control – Integrated Framework.

While putting controls in place may sound simple, many businesses are missing this first step.

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Only 35% of companies have written policies requiring the use of properly licensed software. For CEOs, now is the time to start implementing best practices that will help mitigate security risks and avoid your business becoming tomorrow’s news headline. For more information on additional steps you can take, visit BSA’s website.

BSA Global Software Survey