The New Era of Cybersecurity Breaches: A Case Study and Lessons Learned

Over the last decade, as companies have continued to march forward on the digitization of everything, the cybersecurity risk profile has continued to change. Since 2005, there have been over 9,000 publicly disclosed data breaches. In the last five years, the financial losses due to cyber-attacks have risen by over 62%. Identifying, mitigating and managing cybersecurity risks in today’s environment is a challenging task.

On July 29, 2017, Equifax discovered criminal hackers had broken into its systems. Graeme Payne was one of the first senior executives to be told about the attack. Six weeks later, Equifax announced that the personal information of over 140 million US consumers had been exposed in one of the largest data breaches of the 21st Century. What followed was a challenging response that drew widespread criticism. Graeme Payne was fired on October 2, the day before former Chairman & CEO Richard Smith testified to Congress that the root cause of the data breach was a human error and a technological failure. Graeme Payne would later be identified as “the human error”.

In The New Era of Cybersecurity Breaches, Graeme Payne describes the new era of cybersecurity breaches, the challenges of managing cybersecurity, and the story of the Equifax Cybersecurity Breach. Graeme tells the story of how Equifax became a valuable target for cybercriminals, the conclusions reached by various investigators regarding the cause of the breach, the challenges faced by Equifax in responding to the breach, and the widespread consequences that continue to have an impact.

The New Era of Cybersecurity Breaches is a must-read for board members, executives, managers and security leaders. This book will help you understand:

• The importance of implementing strong procedural, technical, and people controls to secure your systems.
• Essential lessons in preparing for, and responding to, a major data breach when (not if) one occurs.
• The critical role boards and senior leaders have in your organization’s cybersecurity program.

The lessons learned from major cybersecurity breaches, including the Equifax 2017 Data Breach, can be applied to your company to “test and improve” your cybersecurity posture.