Why businesses should invest in cyber security

Businesses should invest in cyber security to protect their companies from today’s growing online threats.

Angel Redoble, chief information security officer of ePLDT, said this during the recent Innovation Summit.

Redoble said that businesses should start investing and taking into consideration cyber security in their operations.

Recently, cybersecurity has become a serious matter. Cyber risk is not quantifiable and unpredictable until you are compromised,” he said.

But once you are compromised, financial loss, compliance issues, legal issues, and reputation problems will become quantifiable, added Redoble who is an ISO27001 certified lead auditor, certified ethical hacker, and certified hacking forensic investigator.

In his 23 years in the profession, he said cyber attacks such as cyber war, cyber terrorism, and cybercrime have increasingly evolved as threats to the business industry.

At the same time, Redoble said the success rate of cyber attacks had also increased over the years because cyber criminals had also innovated their tactics on crashing a company’s software to access information.

“A cyber weapon does not require a special facility and it costs nothing,” he said, describing cyber weapons as a poor man’s weapon of mass destruction.

In the World Economic Forum, cyber threats were ranked as the third biggest threats in the world while the top threat was natural disasters.
By 2021, the risk of financial loss will be up to $6 trillion.

Cebu Bankers Club President Fritz Palileo said that banks were already handling these kinds of threats.

“Banks have risk management committees that take charge of all risks including cyber threats,” Palileo said in a phone interview.

He also cited blockchain technology as one way to protect one’s businesses from online threats.

“As for blockchain it is a decentralized and shared, more like a community platform where data is shared by all participants which is difficult to hack,” he said.

Robert Go, Philippine Retailers Association Cebu Chapter president, also agrees that businesses should invest in cyber security.

“Cyber security is a must nowadays,” Go said in a separate phone interview.

He cited an incident where a rural bank was hacked and records of all their deposits were held ransom by ransomware.

He said they had to pay a lot of money to the hackers to free their records.

As for the retail industry, Go said that retailers were also addressing the issue.

“We retailers are hiring and creating a department that takes care of records, and (find ways) how to prevent hackers, seeing the very important and potentially dangerous business risk. This is also mandated by governments now. We have to hire experts to run this department,” Go said.