The Cybersecurity Threat in the C-Level

CEOs the greatest cybersecurity threat to the enterprise

You’ve been hacked, and it’s generating big headlines. What happens next, now that your board and the media are asking who’s going to pay? If history is our guide, it’s probably your CEO; in the event of a major breach, the buck usually stops with your top guy (or gal).

But it turns out that when it comes to cybersecurity, protecting the enterprise is not only a C-suite responsibility. In fact, it turns out that mobile businesses actually consider their C-levels as the most significant cybersecurity threat in the enterprise.

Finally, some countermeasures have been set in place to reduce the cybersecurity threats to the enterprise, especially those posed by public, free and paid Wi-Fi networks. According to a Mobile Security Report, almost 50% of the organizations in the U.K. banned their employees from using public Wi-Fi with a company owned device, citing possible cybersecurity threats.

Despite education, end users across the organization may well access public Wi-Fi networks with their own device, often transmitting personal information as well as work related data. Antivirus and firewalls may be used for online safety although often these tools do not protect users from hackers performing attacks on public and private hotspots.

Company employees are also advised to rely on HTTPS in order to protect their online transactions. Hackers have found alternative routes to access this type of information, like using fake websites in order to collect any type of SSL certificate. Even secured websites can be a target, so they are not invulnerable to clever cyberattacks. The threats mentioned above may lead to traffic interception, man-in-the-middle attacks, etc.

A safe alternative is to use tunnelling techniques such as a Virtual Private Network (VPN) in order to provide a proper traffic encryption and using secure Internet Access Points, like MIOWIFI, avoiding hotels and restaurantes Internet connections.