The Online Trust Alliance (OTA) has released its 2017 Cyber Incident & Breach Response Guide. The ninth annual guide provides organizations with tools to enhance data protection, adopt responsible privacy practices and help to detect, mitigate and effectively respond to a cyber incident.
OTA’s 2017 Guide has broadened to include the wider impact of cyber incidents. These include more than the compromise of consumer data. They involve business interruption from ransomware, stealing of funds via business email compromise (BEC), distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), and takeover of critical infrastructure and physical systems.
In the report, OTA concludes that there were approximately 82,000 cyber incidents in 2016 impacting about 225 organizations worldwide every day. Since the majority of cyber incidents are never reported, OTA believes the actual number in 2016 could exceed 250,000. The 82,000 confirmed cyber incidents is more than twenty times that of the estimated number of consumer data breaches reported for 2016.
OTA determined that more than 90 percent of all cyber incidents in 2016 could have been easily prevented. In the guide, OTA provides a series of checklists to help organizations prevent, detect, remediate and respond to data loss incidents. This end-to-end readiness plan, which recognizes one size does not fit all, enables organizations to control and manage the fall-out of an incident.
To download the guide, go to https://otalliance.org/incident