PwC’s 24th CEO survey says 95% of Australian CEOs see cyber risk as the top threat to business
growth, which means that greater focus and funds and are spent on ensuring the cyber safety
of all online ventures. As a result, about 75% of Australian CEOs now include cyber risk in their
basic strategic risk management activities.

In fact, the Information Security and Risk Management sector in Australia saw a spending
increase from $4.9 billion to $5.1 billion since last year. And 78% of Australian CEOs say they’re
increasing spending on cyber security. But are they mapping their limited resources to key
validated risks?

Major Threats to Businesses and Organization

Throughout COVID, criminals are only getting smarter/more innovative, with threats evolving
daily and schemes ever more sophisticated. Not to mention the dramatic rise of Ransomware
targeting of businesses and organizations – large and small. The Australian Cyber Security
Centre recently issued a warning to multiple sectors targeted by a particularly insidious kind of
ransomware. Criminals even scan your data for cyber insurance information to see what you
can afford to pay. All meaning not only interruption of business operations, but enduring
impacts to reputation and a company’s bottom line from extensive costs to clean up and
remediate the damage to systems and data. Ultimately, CEO’s and Executive Teams
understand that cyber risk is a daily part of doing business today, but they may not necessarily
know where to start or how best to approach these kinds of technology-based risks.

CEO Should Lead the Kick-Off and Long-Term Implementation of a Cyber Risk Program

A quarter (25%) of respondents to the PwC survey said they need to do more measuring and
reporting – while foundational this is not sufficient. A Cyber Risk Program enables CEOs to
determine the crown jewels of your company, identify and mitigate key risks impacting your
infrastructure and operations, while measuring and reporting maturity and improvement over
time.

By going through this process, you rightly question your inside team’s, managed service
provider or security vendor’s digital age risk assumptions, ensuring you are smartly holding
them accountable. The next step is to get a ‘Hacker View’ of your Cyber Risks from a best of
breed cyber risk monitoring SaaS service, in order to identify, prioritize & mitigate those Risks
continuously. And depending upon the size and complexity of a company, add an annual or bi-
annual Red Team review to validate the top risks that need to be addressed the soonest.
Finally, Cyber Risk Mitigation is a team sport – involve all key stakeholders and communicate
with your Board and Executive Team about key benchmarks and progress. After all, cyber risk is
business risk. A Cyber Risk Program puts you on the path to business resilience, performance
and success in The Digital Age.

Comprehensive security solutions for SMB and Enterprise

Barclay Pearce Capital's client WhiteHawk Inc (ASX:WHK) is focused on next-generation approaches that leverage publicly available data sets, Artificial Intelligence (AI) based analytics, and online risk platforms that scale to identify, prioritise and mitigate a breadth of digital age risks in the near real-time.  Their methods have been tested and evolved with government departments and Fortune 500 companies.

Using machine learning, any business can access their online and virtual service to help you discover, learn, receive immediate online matches to top solutions, find insights, affordable vendor products and services, or chat with smart cyber advisors in real-time, so you can own your cyber risk and success story.

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