Elizabeth Leigh
Rafeeq Rehman, senior security solutions architect at Verizon Terremark, has urged enterprises to draw lessons from large data breaches that have occurred to retailers in the U.S. and around the world.
“While IT and security professionals are trying to piece together information about how the recently reported  U.S. data breaches happened and how many customers are impacted, one thing is very clear: today’s cyber attacks are very sophisticated, well planned and expertly executed,” Rehman wrote in a Feb. 5 post on Terremark’s blog.
He believes a company can further secure assets by changing its mindset from “thinking if” to “assuming when” an attack will happen.
“Just hoping your business won’t be the target of a cyber attack is not a sound strategy. It’s necessary to both actively monitor as well as prepare a response scenario,” Rehman wrote.
Rehmen also recommends companies re-examine where they store collected data for business intelligence and how secure that information is.
He advised corporations to consider potential losses to reputation and finances that could occur due to a large breach of stored data.
“Damage to brand name is not a myth as shown by YouGov’s sentiment survey, and cost of breakins can go into hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said.
“In the New Year it is time to make a resolution to do better in security monitoring, incident/crises management, and awareness programs,” Rehman concluded.
