Overconfident security execs may be putting their organisations at greater risk, according to new research.
A report by services firm Accenture has revealed that of the 2,000 enterprise security practitioners – representing companies with annual revenues of more than $1bn – three in four were confident in their ability to stop all crooks getting into their systems.
Titled Building Confidence: Facing the Cybersecurity Conundrum (PDF), the report revealed that more than half of security executives admit it can take months to detect sophisticated breaches, and a third of those successful breaches are never discovered at all.
[...] The French spend 9.4 per cent of their total IT budget on security, ahead of the 8.2 per cent global average, while the Australians tend to scrimp by with a mere 7.6 per cent on security, pipped by the Americans at 8 per cent – though ironically it is French, American and Australian companies who are the least confident in their ability to monitor for a breach.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/02/survey_finds_75_of_security_execs_believe_they_are_invicible/
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Thursday November 03 2016, @10:00AM
When I worked in advertising, on the digital side, I ran a little experiment with myself. Normally I loathe advertising and mock every ad I see, because I'm contrarian that way, by nature. But I supposed, "Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm just a malcontent, misanthrope whose contrarian views are the problem. Maybe the answer is to move with the herd. Perhaps that way lies true happiness." So I tried everything we ran campaigns on (I was the digital guy for the agency so I worked with every brand from DeBeers to Johnson & Johnson), that "surprising splash" gum that came out a decade ago, those shower soothers that release menthol vapors when they dissolve. And at the same time I was sampling the product, I was watching the results data for the campaigns closely (as the digital guy we had much more detailed response metrics than the TV, Print, or Out-of-Home guys).
I concluded that for the most part, advertising is treading water. When an MBA takes over as a new brand manager at some company, they want to show some kind delta in the sales. They'll change the color of the packaging, add mint flavor to the medicine, or some other window dressing, and they run an ad campaign based on that. That might surprise a lot of people, but that's the bulk of all advertising. (It's also why packaging designers command such big money, but that's a tangent). I also saw how small the customer base for most brands is. Even big brands, brands you'd recognize, like Listerine or Absolut vodka, have sales figures in the tens of thousands, not the millions. The revenues on those brands is in the millions, not the tens of millions--that's not a lot of money if you're paying MBA salaries. So if they get any kind of small number of people to try something new, the brand managers declare victory and jockey to get promoted to bigger brands in the company. Nearly all the time the sales numbers regress to the mean, but by then the ad guys at the agency and the brand managers at the companies have moved on.
Once or twice in a generation you have a marketing-led change in a market, like Geico's ad campaigns with the cavemen, or Apple's success with iPods/Pads/Phones, but they are by far the exception to the rule.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Sarasani on Thursday November 03 2016, @12:47PM
Obligatory watching for anyone interested in the concept of advertising: Lee Camp's "Advertisements are assholes [youtube.com]"
Gotta love the bonus side effects: "more manageable, shiny with extra bounce." I'll have me some of that! But yes, anxiety; explains most of the redundant (pleonasm?) advertising we've been bombarded with for decades.