Many Businesses Fail To Disclose Data Breaches

Only about 35% of businesses worldwide say they share attack and threat information with others in their industry, even though 77% admit to suffering from a cyberattack.

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There are likely many more breached retailers than Target, Neiman Marcus, Michaels, and Sally Beauty either unaware that they have been hit or not yet ready to go public. There also are many data breaches, even at retailers, that may never see the light of day: As a matter of fact, some 57% of organizations worldwide say they do not voluntarily report hacks that aren't bound by disclosure laws.

So says a new report published Tuesday by Arbor Networks and The Economist Intelligence Unit, which surveyed some 360 C-level or board-level business executives around the globe on their incident-response posture. Some 77% of the respondents say their firms had been hit with a cyberattack in the past two years, but only about 35% say they share attack and threat information with other organizations in their industry, 32% say they do not share such intelligence, and 27% did not say one way or the other.

"Only a third of companies are willing to share information about incidents with other organizations ... But these days, the only way to defend is sharing," says Dan Holden, director of Arbor's ASERT.

Threat and attack intelligence-sharing is widely considered crucial to fight the bad guys and to give organizations information to prepare or defend against attack campaigns.

Read the rest of this story on Dark Reading.

About the Author

Kelly Jackson Higgins, Editor-in-Chief, Dark Reading

Kelly Jackson Higgins is the Editor-in-Chief of Dark Reading. She is an award-winning veteran technology and business journalist with more than two decades of experience in reporting and editing for various publications, including Network Computing, Secure Enterprise Magazine, Virginia Business magazine, and other major media properties. Jackson Higgins was recently selected as one of the Top 10 Cybersecurity Journalists in the US, and named as one of Folio's 2019 Top Women in Media. She began her career as a sports writer in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, and earned her BA at William & Mary. Follow her on Twitter @kjhiggins.

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