Survey: Don’t Overestimate Your Cybersecurity – Info Risk Manage

There are still signs that US firms are overconfident about their cybersecurity risk. We just completed a survey with Ovum and found that:

• 68 percent of US firms surveyed said they are better prepared for data breaches than their competitors — up from 60 percent last year.
• Power and utilities providers respondents in the US were the most confident, or least realistic, with 86 percent rating their firms above average or top performers.
• Telecommunications providers were second, with 72 percent saying their firm was top or better than average for cyber-readiness.
• Financial services respondents were the least confident, or most realistic, with 60 percent rating their firms above average or top performers.

FICO will host a Tweet Chat on this survey, July 19th at 11.00 am Eastern Time, 8:00 am Pacific Time, 4:00 pm UK Time. Use #cybertrends to follow the discussion.

“IT leaders have greater funding than ever to protect organizations from the continuously evolving threat landscape and meet complex compliance demands,” said Maxine Holt, research director at Ovum. “These same IT leaders are undoubtedly keen to believe that the money being spent provides their organization with a better security posture than any other – but the rapid pace of investment, often in point solutions, rarely takes an organization-wide view of security.”

“Firms have a lot to lose when it comes to their privacy and security risk and must have an accurate picture of how protected they really are,” said Doug Clare, vice president for cybersecurity solutions at FICO. “These figures point to the fact that many firms don’t know how they compare against to their competitors, which could lead to an under-investment in cybersecurity protection. Based on the survey results, many organizations would be surprised by what an objective view from the FICO Enterprise Security Score could tell them about their relative levels of cyber risk.”

Of course, there is now an easy way to gauge your cybersecurity risk. Last month, FICO announced that it is offering free subscriptions to the Portrait portal of the FICO^® Enterprise Risk Suite, which gives businesses access to their FICO^® Enterprise Security Score. The score, a machine learning-based cybersecurity rating service, can show organizations how business partners and cyber insurance underwriters see their network security, and can help them benchmark their performance.

For more results from our survey, read our e-book, Views From the C Suite.