Boards must act on cyber security - or heads will roll

If you are currently sitting in your office reviewing risk for 2016 and thinking that the biggest cyber threat is a 15-year-old leaking customer credit card numbers, think again.

Cyber attackers are increasingly sophisticated. They can break onto a corporate network very stealthily and give very little indication they are there, making nano-second movements in a month. They are almost impossible to detect.

So now imagine that instead of trying to steal data, they alter it instead. Perhaps, it is bank account information, or maybe numbers on a balance sheet. And, because the process is so subtle, this goes unnoticed for months or years. And when the attackers tell you this has happened, you don’t have a way of recovering the accurate data because this has gone on so long that you can’t trust your back up files.