60% of all (cyber) attacks are carried out by insiders. This is an alarming reality that is mentioned in the article. As information technology becomes more important in the way companies do business, so do data scientists. Also, more and more employees who are responsible for the IT part of the company become important assets as well. It is no secret that the growth of information technology within companies has brought up questions about privacy. Where do we draw lines? It does not matter how good the innovation is, we should not forget the human aspects of these processes. Like the example of Airbnb, where a house can have several different occupants in the time span of just a week. On first sight, Airbnb is a great innovation. But what about the neighbors, who will have to deal with new people every other day, and might feel unsafe? These are possible privacy breaches that too often are not taken into account.
Now back to the article, since the article mentions an even bigger problem connected to the increase in the use of information technology. Namely, the infiltration of criminals in organisations, solely to breach their security and hack data. No, this is not a movie. This is reality, and a very alarming one. The question that arises is: How should companies protect themselves? The article mentions some good examples, such as focusing on the right assets, applying deep analytics, knowing your people and not forgetting the basics. However, in the end, it seems like it all comes down to taking a leap of faith. One can suggest increasing all these preventive actions, but how will this affect the employees who are honest? It is not unthinkable that their commitment will decrease, since they might have the feeling that they are neither appreciated nor trusted within the company.
As the use of big data grows, so does the possible damage that stolen data can do. Just imagine how valuable the data of customers and companies is over, for example, a time span of 10 years. The article mentions that the health care, manufacturing and financial services industries are the most attacked industries. If the increased work of data scientists of those industries gets stolen, the damage could certainly be catastrophic. Even though data-scientists are not rare, they are also not very common and widespread. Thus, when a company is hasty in acquiring their own data scientist, they might contract the wrong person, and incur a great loss. It seems like the increase of information technology is a full deal package. You receive the good, but along with it you might just get some bad…
Article: https://hbr.org/2016/09/the-biggest-cybersecurity-threats-are-inside-your-company
