By: Jordon Stockwell

Despite being identified in boardrooms for years as a business issue, IT leaders are still primarily responsible for cybersecurity. The capacity to react fast and accurately to constantly evolving attacks that can hit anywhere within an organization’s IT infrastructure is necessary to defend against modern cyber threat activities. Cyber risk incidents can have expensive operational, financial, reputational, and strategic impacts on a business. As a result, conventional security solutions are no longer as effective, and the majority of businesses must now increase their cybersecurity efforts. Organizations require an integrated security architecture that can support automated and coordinated threat prevention and response across the entire corporate IT infrastructure, full security visibility, and access to real-time threat intelligence.

 Common Cybersecurity Attacks:

 1. Phishing Attacks

Attackers persuade authorized users with the appropriate access credentials into performing an action that lets unauthorized users in and allows them to transfer data and information out (data exfiltration).

2. Account Breaches Due to Compromised Passwords

Unauthorized users utilize software or other hacking tools to find frequently used passwords that they can use to access private assets, data, or systems.

3. Network-Related Attacks

Failure to encrypt messages inside and outside an organization’s firewall could allow attackers to

eavesdrop on unencrypted network traffic, divert, or interrupt traffic.

So why does an organization’s cybersecurity fail? Simply put, the failure of cybersecurity is a result of

insufficient controls. There is no organization that is completely secure, and unfortunately malicious

people or threats are outside of their control. Only investments and priorities in security preparation are under the control of your organization. Notably, cybersecurity concerns heavily involve the human aspect. Cybercriminals have perfected the art of psychological manipulation, and they use increasingly sophisticated techniques to persuade employees to click on dangerous links.

Cybersecurity is associated with a variety of different business risks, while both the threats and the technologies are expanding rapidly. Given this, a variety of stakeholders must collaborate to guarantee the proper level of security and prevent blind spots. The responsibility for cybersecurity still mostly rests with IT management, despite the rising perception that it is a business risk. “A 2021 Gartner survey found that the CIO, CISO or their equivalent were held accountable for cybersecurity at 85% of organizations. Non-IT senior managers held accountability in only 10% of organizations surveyed, and only 12% of boards have a dedicated board-level cybersecurity committee.” CIOs should collaborate with their boards to make sure that all parties who make business choices that have an impact on enterprise security share responsibility, accountability, and governance in order to provide adequate security.