Please enter a creative title for your assignment. This will be displayed as the title of your submission post.
Role of Cyber Security
Please enter your answer to the question: What is the role of cyber security in an organization? Don’t forget to provide examples!
Cybersecurity plays a number of critical roles in an organization, the first being to protect and defend the company's reputation and revenue. If protected information (e.g. human resources information, financial data, customer data, or intellectual property) isn't secured and falls into the hands of a bad actor (someone with malicious intent) or the company’s competition, the harm to the company’s reputation can be devastating. Without a positive reputation, the company’s revenue will naturally suffer; customers and other companies will be unwilling to trust you with their sensitive, private, proprietary, confidential and secret information. An example of this are the numerous compromises (hacks) of retail outlets (Target, 2013 and 2015), hotels (Marriott, 2018 and 2020), financial institutions (Equifax, 2018), and even the U.S. Government (Office of Personal & Management, 2015). To the point of reputation impacting revenue, Target’s sales in 2015 plummeted when the details of what customer information was exposed was reported to customers. Cybersecurity’s second role is to enable the company to operate freely and without constraint in targeted markets and industries, without imposing overly restrictive or onerous security processes on users. Modern companies do business on a global scale and at the speed of digital, often with mobile users accessing the company’s systems from any number of locations, times and devices; cybersecurity must enable this freedom and speed, while also defending and protecting from extraordinary Advanced and Persistent Threats from bad actors. Examples of this type of tension between security and adversaries can be read any day on the from page of the Wall Street Journal. A specific example would be the ThreatPost article dated June 2019 (https://threatpost.com/leaky-amazons3- buckets-expose-data-of-netflix-td-bank/146084/) reporting that Netflix, TD Bank, and Ford all exposed proprietary customer data in an Amazon S3 Bucket, and the data had been made available for sale on the dark web.

No comments