Nearly all organisations, large and small have experienced a security breach. These breaches may have been the result of a mistake (inadvertently exposing data), an inside job or as a result of some form of hacking attack.
The breaches vary in size: from a few personal records to current world's largest of 500 million account details stolen from Yahoo.
Whatever their size or however they are caused, these breaches can have serious consequences, event to the extent of causing organisations to collapse or go bankrupt.
Customers trust organisations to look after their data (names, passwords, credit card data etc) so when security breaches occur, customer confidence falls and the reputation of the company and the brand is damaged. Ultimately, this affects the bottom line of the company.
Recent surveys consistently show that high profile security breaches have an adverse effect on consumer trust in brands. According to a FireEye report, 76% of customer respondents would take their business elsewhere, And 3/4 of consumers would stop buying from a company if they discovered that the breach was due to the company failing to prioritise security.
Organisations can suffer severe financial losses following significant security breaches. The losses are the result of:
Increasingly, the minimum standards of care that data users have to take in securing personal data are laid down in law. Where a data breach occurs, they can be taken to court or in the UK reported to the Information Commission for failing to follow the standards under the Data Protection Act 1988.
Almost 60% of consumers report report that they would take legal action against organisations, if a breach resulted in their personal details be used for criminal purposes. Where class actions (people pursue legal action as a group) can occur, fines can reach millions of pounds.
Collecting data to store, analyse and put to use, costs money and it relies upon the willingness of customers to share data. But following recent high profile security breaches, over 70% consumers now share fewer details with companies.
For search engines to social media platforms, this matters, because they rely on collecting detailed consumer data which they can share with advertisers so that they can target customers who might have an interest in their products.
Create a new page. Call it Effect of Security Breaches on Organisations and complete the following tasks.
Increasingly, responsibility for safe guarding data is seen as the duty of the data owner. Whereas in the past, especially in small and medium sized enterprises (SME) it was enough to argue they didn't know or have the skills, cybercrime has become so widely known that that excuse is no long sufficient. .
Add a new part to your page titled The Unwritten Law. Visit Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) page
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