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

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%)

 

The bebe Hack: Guarding Against Cyberbreach During the Holiday Shopping Season

bebe data breach

On Friday, retail chain bebe announced that it had identified an attack on computers that operate the in-store payment processing system. The attack may have exposed data from cards swiped in retail locations in the U.S., Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands between Nov. 8 and Nov. 26, including cardholder name, account number, expiration date and verification code. The breach did not impact customers who shopped online or in other international locations, bebe reported, and the company has hired a security firm to stop and investigate the attack.

Almost exactly a year after the massive Target hack, this latest incident comes after a steady stream of sizable breaches among retailers, including Home Depot, JPMorgan Chase and eBay. Consumers have begun to find these hacks increasingly less surprising, and stopped paying as much attention – a phenomenon many are calling “breach fatigue.”

But companies are not entirely off the hook. While Target is on the rebound and subsequent breach victims have endured less damage to consumer perception, these cybersecurity incidents still demand a notable amount of contingency planning and mitigation.

According to public relations and social media firm Affect, there are four keys to protecting brand reputation in the event of a security breach:

1) Develop a Fully Locked and Loaded Response Plan

In the digital age, it is essential to have a cyber attack plan in place as part of an organization’s crisis management strategy. Companies can get ahead of a crisis by leveraging social media to diffuse damaging situations. In order to prepare, be sure to anticipate and understand the kinds of threats that could influence your business and your industry.

“There are four phases of crisis communications: readiness, response, reassurance and recovery,” said Sandra Fathi, president of Affect. “In order to properly respond to a crisis, each stage must be ready to go at a moment’s notice — develop materials such as messages and prepared statements, prepare delivery channels like hotlines and social media platforms and train employees regarding awareness and organizational procedures.
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2) The Customer is Top Priority

Arguably the most important step in maintaining a brand’s image amid a breach is to be honest with customers and inform them about what has occurred — the sooner the better, especially if their personal information is at stake. In fact, 47 states have Security Breach Notification Laws that govern communication with customers in the face of a security breach including the timeline for those communications. Several weeks elapsed before Target released an official statement to their customers and as a result, experienced massive backlash from customers, other organizations and the media alike.

Adam Levin, chairman and founder of IDT911, a provider of data risk and identity management services, believes every company needs to demonstrate three things in the wake of a data breach.

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“Urgency, transparency, and empathy are all critical. I don’t think they [Target] showed enough of those three,” Levin said in an interview with ABCNews.com. Not being upfront with customers can result in a loss of confidence in the brand that can hinder not only the company’s reputation, but could lead to a loss in revenue.

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3) Monitor the Situation in Real-Time

Social media can be a powerful tool but “with great power comes great responsibility.” While positive engagements boost a brand’s respect, companies must always monitor for negative interactions in real-time and be even more stringent during a security breach, as customers will turn to social media to respond to situations, regardless of their allegiance to the brand. Develop a Social Media Response Map that outlines anticipated situations and correlated standard responses to avoid any last minute shuffle. Don’t shy away from angry customers that continuously post adverse comments.

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Depending on the situation, it may be worthwhile to engage with these individuals in a private forum and resolve their concerns, taking the negative sentiments offline.

4) Don’t Repeat the Same Mistakes

For brands, it is especially important to not make the same mistakes twice. Customers may or may not forgive a first offense, so a second go-around is even harder to rebound from. Companies must carefully document and analyze each breach to identify how it happened, why it happened and how to prevent such an event in the future. Consider changing security vendors, deploying new software, re-training staff and amending company policies. It is also important to communicate these changes to customer to reassure them that a similar breach will not reoccur.

Lessons from MBIA: When Breaches Go Viral

data breach

We can add another breached company to the ever-growing list: the Municipal Bond Insurance Association (MBIA). While not necessarily unique from other breaches we’ve seen lately, the MBIA incident brought another aspect of breach fallout into the public eye, and that’s the potential for data exposures to go viral. These viral breaches generate tendrils of compromised information that reach far and wide, creating a nightmare for containment—and public relations.

Known as the largest bond insurer in the country, MBIA services accounts for many government investment pools. In late September, the company was alerted by an ethical hacker that hundreds of pages of customer data were showing up online for all to see. We’ve since learned that one of the company’s database servers had been improperly configured, resulting in the exposure of highly sensitive data. Account numbers were compromised along with customers’ names, account balances and other confidential information. But the damage didn’t stop there. Not only was MBIA’s customer data floating around the Internet for all to see, it also had been indexed by several search engines. Information that should have been heavily protected was now on the Web in multiple locations, far outside the control of MBIA.

The release of customer data wasn’t the only problem. High-level security keys were also exposed and indexed, including administrative credentials and instructions for creating new deposit accounts. Not only were cybercriminals given a nearly perfect tutorial to dig into additional data held by MBIA that hadn’t been compromised in the first go-round, the instructions also provided a way for thieves to quietly pull funds out of the compromised accounts. The integrity of MBIA’s systems had been damaged far beyond a simple data breach.

Piling on to the organization’s woes were two failures of their own making. One is that their Oracle server is commonly known to need careful configuration to avoid a potential security gap.

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Oracle has even provided documentation to help administrators configure it correctly and ensure the servers are secure. The other was that MBIA was actually notified of the exposure more than a week before the company finally cut off access to the compromised server.

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Not only was the company behind the curve in configuring its critical infrastructure correctly, it then delayed in fixing a problem that was brought to its attention.

In many respects, MBIA’s breach wasn’t all that different from other breaches. Network vulnerabilities are common avenues for hackers, and security warnings have been known to be overlooked. Target’s massive 2013 breach and similar recent exposures back this up.

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Unfortunately for MBIA, these factors all came together in a perfect storm that resulted in a truly viral breach. Sensitive customer data was compromised and unspeakably valuable credentials and account creation instructions were also exposed. The indexing of that information on more than one major search engine spread the leaked data far and wide. Containment and mitigation became exponentially more difficult.

There is some reasonably good news in all of this. At this time, it doesn’t appear any of MBIA’s clients were defrauded as a result of the breach—yet. There are also important lessons we can learn from MBIA’s mistakes. Network assets must be carefully administered, as their security is one of the first lines of defense against criminals. In addition, security warnings—whether they’re provided by ethical hackers, concerned customers or automated intrusion detection systems—must be immediately checked out.

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Corporate Reputation Drastically Impacts Talent Acquisition, Salary Costs

According to a study from Corporate Responsibility Magazine and talent acquisition firm Alexander Mann Solutions, company reputation has a significant impact on staff recruitment, retention, and salary expenses. Prospective candidates are extremely hesitant to join a company with a bad reputation and, among those who may be willing to accept a job offer, a significant pay raise is required. Conversely, they can be tempted to move to a company with a good reputation for a significantly lower raise.

To leave their current employer and take a job with a company with a bad reputation, males would require an average of a 53% pay increase—60% among females. In total, nearly half  (48%) would require more than a 50% increase in pay. While 93% of people who are currently employed would leave their employer to work for a company with a good reputation, that rate goes down to 70% for companies with a bad reputation. Workers would only require, on average, a 33% pay increase to move to a company with a good reputation, with just 18% requiring a raise of more than 50%.

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Among companies with a bad reputation:

Expense to Recruit to Company with Bad Reputation

Among those with a good reputation:

Expense to Recruit to Company with Good Reputation

These trends hold true and are even magnified among unemployed individuals. An overwhelming 76% of people said they are unlikely to accept a job offer from a company with a bad reputation, even if they do not hold a current job.

Odds of Accepting Job with Company of Bad Reputation While Unemployed

Researchers found that companies face increased recruiting costs due to the greater difficulty to source and attract new hires, particularly when recruiting women and more experienced workers.

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But these costs are far from the greatest of a company’s troubles.

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“While recruiting expense increases are in the millions of dollars, this great expense is literally dwarfed by the billions of salary cost differential,” the study reads. “The cost of recruiting and salaries added to any expenses associated with a reputation damaged by an environmental scandal, for example, can be disastrous to a company’s bottom line.”

Further, CEO reputation can make a critical impact on the success and expense required to recruit top talent. “A CEO perceived to be active in CR and environmental issues has impact on recruiting. This reputation should be maximized when building the employer brand or against competitors whose reputations may be weaker,” the study said.

The study also examined the most damaging sources of a bad corporate reputation:

Most Harmful Sources of Bad Corporate Reputation