Unfortunately, digital transformative is not just a positive story. Not only companies but also actors with less noble intentions, such as black hat hackers, have become increasingly professional in recent years.
These malicious actors have gone through their own digital evolution in which they have become progressively more focused and their attacks increasingly more complex. In the past decade, they shifted their attention from B2C (business to consumer) hacking towards a B2B (business to business) strategy.
It might seem strange how we compare these black hat hackers with a legitimate business, but this really how they operate. They create strategies on how they can maximize their return on invested time and it seems that spearfishing key employees, such as upper management or financial administrators, or infecting key assets with ransomware is a lot more lucrative than impersonating a Nigerian prince.
They are also benefiting from the digital transformation that legitimate businesses are undergoing. The introduction of new technologies such as the cloud and IoT devices causes a serious increase in potential attack routes. In the pre-cloud era, organizations only needed to protect their internal network and corporate assets, while today they need to factor in all potential connections towards the corporate environments and data, which have increased exponentially.
This leads us to the logical conclusion that security must be integrated into your digital transformation strategy in order for it to be truly successful in managing modern Cybersecurity Threats.
As stated in a previous paragraph, malicious hackers want to optimize their return on investment. In order to decrease your organization’s risk you must make sure that trying to attack your organization is not a good investment by making sure that your security is better than that of comparable organizations. This is why you should include security benchmarking as a tool in order to define your optimal level of security maturity and expenditure.
All organizations, from SMEs to large international corporations, are potentially attractive targets for hackers. When a company’s size increases, the potential ransoms but also the complexity required to launch a successful attack often increase. That is why there are hacker attacks for each ‘payoff/complexity’ subsegment. The aim is to be as unattractive a target as possible within your subsegment, depending on the industry in which you operate, without overinvesting.
The goal is to be and remain a bit more secure than your direct competitors.
