Working to fortify digital assets to beat cybercrime

The Active Ownership team has just completed a three-year engagement program with nine companies, reaching a successful conclusion with seven of them. They were chosen because they operate using sensitive customer data in the payments, telecoms and household products sectors.

Most now have a clear strategy focused on improving their cybersecurity following a number of high-profile data breaches for some. However, most were reluctant to provide full transparency on their weaknesses, partly to avoid exposing any risk management gaps to criminals or competitors.

Cybercrime has become a global business on a par with the drugs industry, the costs of which have risen from about USD 500 billion in 2017 to an estimated USD 6 trillion in 2020. Since virtually all companies have digital operations in some form, their need to fortify and protect their digital assets has never been greater.

“As digitalization expands far beyond the tech realm, so do the associated cyber threats,” says Active Ownership Analyst Carolina Vergroesen. “Cybercrime can include anything from small, local security incidents with minor consequences, to cyberattacks which can disturb significant parts of the global economy.”

“Lax cybersecurity practices represent a clear and obvious threat to company business models. While these risks have become distinct in recent years, less clarity exists on the steps taken by companies to mitigate such risks.”

The engagement theme focused on five topics: governance and oversight; policy and procedure; risk management and controls; transparency and disclosure; and privacy by design. Originally, eleven companies were picked in 2018, but one was dropped after it was divested due to poor financial performance, and another was taken over.

“Most of the companies in our engagement peer group acknowledged the risks related to cybersecurity, but their approaches to this risk differed vastly,” says Vergroesen. “Whereas some considered it a top priority and an essential part of their license to operate, others saw it as merely one of many business risks. This variety resulted in clearly different success rates between companies and in relation to various objectives.”

“For the governance and oversight objective, nearly 80% of all companies had a clear strategy and governance hierarchy in place for managing cybersecurity. However, several transparency topics proved more challenging as most companies preferred to keep their cards close to their chest.”

“This is understandable given that hackers can more easily circumvent barriers if they know exactly which security systems are in place. However, this hesitancy to provide information affected our success rate for our policy and procedure and transparency and disclosure objectives in particular, where engagement was successfully closed with only five of the nine companies.”

The team saw more openness from companies regarding the risk management and controls objective. “Although companies hesitated to disclose their particular responses to cyber threats, they were more open to discussing the sensitivity and integrity of their security controls,” says Vergroesen.

“Several have dedicated teams that regularly test their company’s defenses in order to identify possible gaps in their current practices. We found this especially encouraging as the threat landscape is continuously changing, and companies should be prepared to adapt their security accordingly and respond quickly to with emerging threats.”

Data breaches involving personally identifiable information (PII) are particularly harmful for both the customers affected and the company’s reputation and legal liability. Overall, engagement with six of the nine companies was successfully closed for the privacy by design objective.

“Companies need to be clear to their customers what type of data is collected and for what purpose, and be informed in case of accidental breaches,” says Vergroesen.

“Although most companies had some form of privacy policy in place, the quality of these policies varied substantially. Whereas some were global and very detailed, others were local and only met legal requirements rather than being truly informative for clients.”

Meanwhile, cybersecurity legislation is becoming globalized, greatly boosted in 2018 with the introduction of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This toughened guidelines for what is expected when collecting information for commercial use within the EU and has already been used against companies failing to comply with it. Later this year the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) in the US is expected to have a similar impact on companies as GDPR has had in the EU.

“We are encouraged to see that nearly 80% of countries worldwide have cybersecurity legislation in place,” says Vergroesen. “Continued expansion of this legislation is crucial in ensuring clear standards for companies to adhere to.”

“Although several of the companies under engagement went far beyond legal requirements, many cyber strategies were directly linked to specific legislation.”

But one flipside of the increased attention to cybersecurity is that it has created greater demand for IT specialists, and subsequently a skills gap. A report by the Information Systems Security Association shows that this gap between the demand for and supply of qualified technicians persisted for the fifth consecutive year in 2021.

“As cyber standards are raised globally, companies will have to vie for talent to hire the people who can work in this field,” says Vergroesen. “We believe companies should therefore focus on the development of cyber skills within their organizations, as simply acquiring outside talent might prove to be a difficult challenge.”

As the specific engagement program has ended, the team will now focus on the issue where it is an indirect consequence of digitalization across the spectrum.

“Although this engagement has come to a close, we continue to see the importance of cybersecurity across virtually all industries,” says Vergroesen.

“Specifically, our engagement themes on the digitalization of health care and the social impact of artificial intelligence continue to focus on companies’ diligent implementation of cybersecurity and data privacy practices. There is much work yet to be done; like technology itself it is always moving on.”