What Do Business Execs Worry About Most? Getting Hacked
The biggest occupant of Corporate America’s anxiety closet is now cybersecurity, according to a survey(Opens in a new window) released Thursday by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
The accounting and consulting firm’s latest Pulse survey of several hundred executives found that 40% of them identify “more frequent and/or broader cyberattacks” as a core concern.
“This is the first time it’s actually number one,” Sean Joyce, global cybersecurity and privacy leader at PwC, said during a press call Thursday.
What are these people in suits doing about it? PwC reports that 84% of executives said they were “taking action or monitoring closely policy areas related to cybersecurity, privacy and data protection”; 79% were “revising or enhancing” digital risk management; and 49% said they were “increasing investments in cybersecurity and privacy.”
On the call, Joyce put in a plug for more transparency about lessons learned, something that hacked enterprises have historically balked at. He cited the example of Ireland’s Health Services Executive, which hired PwC to produce a 157-page report (PDF(Opens in a new window)) on its May 2021 experience with Conti ransomware.
“They actually made the decision to publicly disclose their breach and lessons learned,” he said. “I’m hopeful that more companies and entities will do this.”
The PwC report does not address another way to reduce a company’s cybersecurity exposure: adopting data minimization practices that leave less corporate or customer information vulnerable to a data breach.
Joyce said on the call that PwC is seeing many of its clients adopt privacy-by-design approaches that collect less data upfront: “You minimize what you’re actually ingesting and maintaining.”
A separate set of
Read more on pcmag.com
