Long after intruders are removed and public scrutiny has faded, the impacts from a cyberattack can reverberate over a multi-year timeline. Legal costs can cascade as stolen data is leveraged in various ways over time; it can take years to recover pre-incident growth and profitability levels; and brand impact can play out in multiple ways.

That’s from a Deloitte report, “Beneath the surface of a cyberattack: A deeper look at business impacts,” released in late 2016. The report’s contents, and other statements on cyber security from Deloitte, are ironic given the company’s huge breach reported this week.

The big breach

The Deloitte breach was reported on Monday, Sept. 25. It appears to have leaked confidential emails and financial documents of some of its clients. According to the Guardian,

The Guardian understands Deloitte clients across all of these sectors had material in the company email system that was breached. The companies include household names as well as US government departments. So far, six of Deloitte’s clients have been told their information was “impacted” by the hack. Deloitte’s internal review into the incident is ongoing. The Guardian understands Deloitte discovered the hack in March this year, but it is believed the attackers may have had access to its systems since October or November 2016.

The Guardian asserts that hackers gained access to the Deloitte’s global email server via an administrator’s account protected by only a single password. Without two-factor authentication, hackers could gain entry via any computer, as long as they guessed the right password (or obtained it via hacking, malware, or social engineering). The story continues,

In addition to emails, the Guardian understands the hackers had potential access to usernames, passwords, IP addresses, architectural diagrams for businesses and health information. Some emails had attachments with sensitive security and design details.

Okay, the breach was bad. What did Deloitte have to say about these sorts of incidents? Lots.

The Deloitte Cybersecurity Report

In its 2016 report, Deloitte’s researchers pointed to 14 cyberattack impact factors. Half are the directly visible costs of breach incidents; the others which can be more subtle or hidden, and potentially never fully understood.

• The “Above the Surface” incident costs include the expenses of technical investigations, consumer breach notifications, regulatory compliance, attorneys fees and litigation, post-preach customer protection, public relations, and cybersecurity protections.
• Hard to tally are the “Below the Surface” costs of insurance premium increases, increased cost to raise debt, impact of operational disruption/destruction, value of lost contact revenue, devaluation of trade name, loss of intellectual property, and lost value of customer relationship.

As the report says,

Common perceptions about the impact of a cyberattack are typically shaped by what companies are required to report publicly—primarily theft of personally identifiable information (PII), payment data, and personal health information (PHI). Discussions often focus on costs related to customer notification, credit monitoring, and the possibility of legal judgments or regulatory penalties. But especially when PII theft isn’t an attacker’s only objective, the impacts can be even more far-reaching.

Recovery can take a long time, as the Deloitte says:

Beyond the initial incident triage, there are impact management and business recovery stages. These stages involve a wide range of business functions in efforts to rebuild operations, improve cybersecurity, and manage customer and third-party relationships, legal matters, investment decisions, and changes in strategic course.

Indeed, asserts Deloitte in the 2016 report, it can take months or years to repair the damage to the business. That includes redesigning processes and assets, and investing in cyber programs to emerge stronger after the incident. But wait, there’s more.

Intellectual Property and Lawsuits

A big part of the newly reported breach is the loss of intellectual property. That’s not necessarily only Deloitte’s IP, but also the IP of its biggest blue-chip customers. About the loss of IP, the 2016 reports says:

Loss of IP is an intangible cost associated with loss of exclusive control over trade secrets, copyrights, investment plans, and other proprietary and confidential information, which can lead to loss of competitive advantage, loss of revenue, and lasting and potentially irreparable economic damage to the company. Types of IP include, but are not limited to, patents, designs, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets.

We’ll see some of those phrases in lawsuits filed by Deloitte’s customers as they try to get a handle on what hackers may have stolen. Oh, about lawsuits, here’s what the Deloitte report says:

Attorney fees and litigation costs can encompass a wide range of legal advisory fees and settlement costs externally imposed and costs associated with legal actions the company may take to defend its interests. Such fees could potentially be offset through the recovery of damages as a result of assertive litigation pursued against an attacker, especially in regards to the theft of IP. However, the recovery could take years to pursue through litigation and may not be ultimately recoverable, even after a positive verdict in favor of the company. Based on our analysis of publicly available data pertaining to recent consumer settlement cases and other legal costs relating to cyber incidents, we observed that, on average, it could cost companies approximately $10 million in attorney fees, potential settlement of loss claims, and other legal matters.

Who wants to bet that the legal costs from this breach will be significantly higher than $10 million?

Stay Vigilant

The back page of Deloitte’s 2016 report says something important:

To grow, streamline, and innovate, many organizations have difficulty keeping pace with the evolution of cyber threats. The traditional discipline of IT security, isolated from a more comprehensive risk-based approach, may no longer be enough to protect you. Through the lens of what’s most important to your organization, you must invest in cost-justified security controls to protect your most important assets, and focus equal or greater effort on gaining more insight into threats, and responding more effectively to reduce their impact. A Secure. Vigilant. Resilient. cyber risk program can help you become more confident in your ability to reap the value of your strategic investments.

Wise words — too bad Deloitte’s email administrators, SOC teams, and risk auditors didn’t heed them. Or read their own report.

No organization likes to reveal that its network has been breached, or it data has been stolen by hackers or disclosed through human error. Yet under the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), breaches must be disclosed.

The GDPR is a broad set of regulations designed to protect citizens of the European Union. The rules apply to every organization and business that collects or stores information about people in Europe. It doesn’t matter if the company has offices in Europe: If data is collected about Europeans, the GDPR applies.

Traditionally, most organizations hide all information about security incidents, especially if data is compromised. That makes sense: If a business is seen to be careless with people’s data, its reputation can suffer, competitors can attack, and there can be lawsuits or government penalties.

We tend to hear about security incidents only if there’s a breach sufficiently massive that the company must disclose to regulators, or if there’s a leak to the media. Even then, the delay between the breach can take weeks or month — meaning that folks aren’t given enough time to engage identity theft protection companies, monitor their credit/debit payments, or even change their passwords.

Thanks to GDPR, organizations must now disclose all incidents where personal data may have been compromised – and make that disclosure quickly. Not only that, but the GDPR says that the disclosure must be to the general public, or at least to those people affected; the disclosure can’t be buried in a regulatory filing.

Important note: The GDPR says absolutely nothing about disclosing successful cyberattacks where personal data is not stolen or placed at risk. That includes distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, ransomware, theft of financial data, or espionage of intellectual property. That doesn’t mean that such cyberattacks can be kept secret, but in reality, good luck finding out about them, unless the company has other reasons to disclose. For example, after some big ransomware attacks earlier this year, some publicly traded companies revealed to investors that those attacks could materially affect their quarterly profits. This type of disclosure is mandated by financial regulation – not by the GDPR, which is focused on protecting individuals’ personal data.

The Clock Is Ticking

How long does the organization have to disclose the breach? Three days from when the breach was discovered. That’s pretty quick, though of course, sometimes breaches themselves can take weeks or months to be discovered, especially if the hackers are extremely skilled, or if human error was involved. (An example of human error: Storing unencrypted data in a public cloud without strong password protection. It’s been happening more and more often.)

Here’s what the GDPR says about such breaches — and the language is pretty clear. The first step is to disclose to authorities within three days:

A personal data breach may, if not addressed in an appropriate and timely manner, result in physical, material or non-material damage to natural persons such as loss of control over their personal data or limitation of their rights, discrimination, identity theft or fraud, financial loss, unauthorised reversal of pseudonymisation, damage to reputation, loss of confidentiality of personal data protected by professional secrecy or any other significant economic or social disadvantage to the natural person concerned. Therefore, as soon as the controller becomes aware that a personal data breach has occurred, the controller should notify the personal data breach to the supervisory authority without undue delay and, where feasible, not later than 72 hours after having become aware of it, unless the controller is able to demonstrate, in accordance with the accountability principle, that the personal data breach is unlikely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons. Where such notification cannot be achieved within 72 hours, the reasons for the delay should accompany the notification and information may be provided in phases without undue further delay.

The GDPR does not specify how quickly the organization must notify the individuals whose data was compromised, beyond “as soon as reasonably feasible”:

The controller should communicate to the data subject a personal data breach, without undue delay, where that personal data breach is likely to result in a high risk to the rights and freedoms of the natural person in order to allow him or her to take the necessary precautions. The communication should describe the nature of the personal data breach as well as recommendations for the natural person concerned to mitigate potential adverse effects. Such communications to data subjects should be made as soon as reasonably feasible and in close cooperation with the supervisory authority, respecting guidance provided by it or by other relevant authorities such as law-enforcement authorities. For example, the need to mitigate an immediate risk of damage would call for prompt communication with data subjects whereas the need to implement appropriate measures against continuing or similar personal data breaches may justify more time for communication.

The phrase “personal data breach” doesn’t only mean theft or accidental disclosure of a person’s private information. The GDPR defines the phrase as “a breach of security leading to the accidental or unlawful destruction, loss, alteration, unauthorised disclosure of, or access to, personal data transmitted, stored or otherwise processed.” So the loss of important data (think health records) would qualify as a personal data breach.

Big Fines and Penalties

What happens if an organization does not disclose? It can be fined up to 4% of annual global turnover. There’s a cap of €20 million of the fines.

These GDPR rules about breaches are good, and so are the penalties. Too many organizations prefer to hide this type of information, or dribble out disclosures as slowly and quietly as possible, to protect the company’s reputation and share prices. The new EU regulation recognizes that individuals have a vested interest in data that organizations collect or store about them – and need to be told if that data is stolen or compromised.

It’s difficult to recruit qualified security staff because there are more openings than humans to fill them. It’s also difficult to retain IT security professionals because someone else is always hiring. But don’t worry: Unless you work for an organization that refuses to pay the going wage, you’ve got this.

Two recent studies present dire, but somewhat conflicting, views of the availability of qualified cybersecurity professionals over the next four or five years. The first study is the Global Information Security Workforce Study from the Center for Cyber Safety and Education, which predicts a shortfall of 1.8 million cybersecurity workers by 2022. Among the highlights from that research, which drew on data from 19,000 cybersecurity professionals:

• The cybersecurity workforce gap will hit 1.8 million by 2022. That’s a 20 percent increase since 2015.
• Sixty-eight percent of workers in North America believe this workforce shortage is due to a lack of qualified personnel.
• A third of hiring managers globally are planning to increase the size of their departments by 15 percent or more.
• There aren’t enough workers to address current threats, according to 66 percent of respondents.
• Around the globe, 70 percent of employers are looking to increase the size of their cybersecurity staff this year.
• Nine in ten security specialists are male. The majority have technical backgrounds, suggesting that recruitment channels and tactics need to change.
• While 87 percent of cybersecurity workers globally did not start in cybersecurity, 94 percent of hiring managers indicate that security experience in the field is an important consideration.

The second study is the Cybersecurity Jobs Report, created by the editors of Cybersecurity Ventures. Here are some highlights:

• There will be 3.5 million cybersecurity job openings by 2021.
• Cybercrime will more than triple the number of job openings over the next five years. India alone will need 1 million security professionals by 2020 to meet the demands of its rapidly growing economy.
• Today, the U.S. employs nearly 780,000 people in cybersecurity positions. But a lot more are needed: There are approximately 350,000 current cybersecurity job openings, up from 209,000 in 2015.

So, whether you’re hiring a chief information security officer or a cybersecurity operations specialist, expect a lot of competition. What can you do about it? How can you beat the staffing shortage? Read my suggestion in “How to beat the cybersecurity staffing shortage.”