Few issues have dominated the business and political environment in recent times like cyber-attacks or as many would consider it, cyber breaches. Stories of power cuts in Ukraine, the alleged US election data breaches by Russia, the WikiLeaks fiasco, and a similar claim of hack into Ghana’s Electoral Commission’s site at the heat of the December 2016 elections.
Recently, the popular blog host – WordPress reported that some of its user accounts were hacked and had their clients renew their registration and the US email giant - Yahoo also reported a similar development with several thousands of its user accounts across the globe. These are perhaps just a few of several stories of businesses now faced with the hard reality of spending an unanticipated amount of capital on protecting their financial and client information.
A recent study by an IT consultant - CGI and Oxford Economics has it that cyber breaches has in the last 3-4 years resulted in a somewhat permanent drop in companies’ share prices.
In a case study that involved 65 firms, analysis showed that severe consequences of such attacks on corporate entities ranging from legal to regulatory has resulted in the loss of several hundreds of thousands of records, loss of customers, disrepute to brand names, and an average of 1.8% fall in their share prices since 2013.
In addition, shareholders of these 65 companies would as a result be facing a cost on their investments running into the tone of 42 billion pounds ($52.40 billion).
The report further notes that the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 companies would be worse off by an average of £120 million after such attacks.
With financial institutions the most affected by these breaches, CGI's analysis compared each firm’s share price against a number of similar companies in a bid to isolate the impact of cyber breaches from other market movements often associated with low business performance.
The report stated that: "Financial services experience the greatest burden in terms of impact, reflecting the high levels of regulation, the importance of customer confidence and the potential for financial fraud to be a facet of the breach".
However, while the spate of these attacks is obviously on the rise, some companies have stepped-up in their measures to restrain this threats to business: it not out of place to find banks in Accra, Lagos or Mumbai with departments staffed by software experts and sometimes with so much autonomy dedicated to information security.Â
But in spite of that, there are still many more who perhaps still find it an illusion the existence of cyber-attacks and one could only be curious about the fate of their business in this new operating environment.