Collaboration outfit Wire has launched its ‘Odds of a Bad Bet’ report, which details the scale of risks businesses are up against in a time when email is proving an open door for cybercriminals and malicious actors looking to disrupt, exploit and destroy businesses.
The New Wire report co-authored with poker champion/scientific communicator Liv Boeree, and security experts that establish the odds of the gamble businesses are taking with cybersecurity.
The report is developed in collaboration with poker champion, Liv Boeree. Poker is a game of making calculated, strategic decisions in high-stakes situations. As such, Liv can draw parallels between the poker table and the business world. Within the report, she shares the odds of risk in the context of cybersecurity. Key findings include the odds of falling prey to cyberattack, the business cost of such an account, and the ‘best bet’ of future-proofing against an attack.
In one of its central findings, the report identifies email as a company’s greatest cybersecurity vulnerability. Email offers the most significant access point for criminals by exploiting human fallibility — the inability to spot malicious emails. Just as with gambling, the outcomes are influenced by people and their judgement. The fact that employees are unable to discern malicious emails from safe ones points to the inherent vulnerability of email.
An employee is three times more likely to infect a colleague with a malicious email than they are to spread the flu to their partner. An employee’s chances of spotting a phishing email are as slim as hitting a specific number on the roulette wheel, the report said
‘Odds on a Bad Bet’ goes on to underscore relentlessness of cyberattacks leading to heightened odds of a business falling victim:
The chances of your business avoiding a malware attack are as unlikely as pulling the Ace of Spades from a shuffled deck
A company has a 50/50 chance of suffering a costly DoS (denial of service) attack — effectively the same opportunities as a flip of a coin.
A company is over ten times more likely to suffer a week-long downtime from a ransomware attack than you are to experience a house fire.
Given these odds, failing to “future proof” is not a risk business owners should be willing to take. When cyberattacks prevail, the resulting impact has the potential to cause massive damage to the company.
Investigating the likelihood and impact of cyberattacks on a business, the report also considers the following comparison odds:
A company is five times more likely to suffer a debilitating ransomware attack than you are likely to be involved in a car accident
The chances of your business suffering a costly ransomware attack are the same as a hurricane hitting Florida next year
This means that a business is as likely to crash due to a cyber-attack as a startup is to fail because it didn’t get the next round of funding
The odds of risk demonstrate the necessity of implementing future-proofing methods across the business. There’s simply too much at risk not to. And the business benefits of implementing heightened cybersecurity methods are equally clear:
The average ROI for future-proofing a business with end-to-end encryption is twice as high as investing in the S&P 500
Cyber-security costs are rising so fast that waiting another year to invest in cyber-security is the same as letting ten years’ worth of inflation erode the value of your cash, the report said.
With the stakes so high, and the benefit of investing in preventative measures so apparent, businesses have every reason to play their hand carefully.
Liv Boeree said: “When playing global poker series against the world’s best, it pays to understand the odds to reduce the risk, as any miscalculation could mean losing millions of dollar. To see businesses fail to put the best cybersecurity measures in place, such as a secure alternative to email, when the return on investment is so clearly beneficial, is the opposite of good risk management. It’s more akin to the behaviour of a delusional problem gambler.”
Wire CEO Morten Brøgger added: “People’s use and reliance on email is businesses’ greatest security vulnerability. More secure modes of communication and collaboration with end-to-end encryption need to become the standard as email recedes into the past. Especially since the average return on investment for such measures is twice that of investing in the S&P 500. Any business that fails to prepare is betting against the house, and the house always wins.”
The full ‘Odds of a Bad Bet’ report is available to download from here
