Time to start making cyber crime unprofitable for adversaries

The news that British Airways has suffered a data breach, which compromised the card payment details of 380,000 customers, saw comment from Tim Mackey, technical evangelist at Synopsys.

"GDPR has placed us in a world where disclosure of data breaches are likely to occur before the full details of the attack are known. On the positive side, companies are highly incented to improve the level of security monitoring they perform. While to the travelling public, a two week window under which the attack wasn’t properly identified as such is alarming, the reality is that absent regulations like GDPR such incidents could go undisclosed for significantly longer.

"It is my hope that while we see an increase in disclosures in the near term, as organisations improve their software and system security measures a marked decline in successful attacks will ensue."

Israel Barak, chief information security officer at Cybereason, added: "The British Airways breach once again sheds light on the difficulty companies have protecting the proprietary information of their customers that is their backbone. Collectively, this is a blow to our privacy and British Airways joins a growing list of organisations that have faced a knock down punch.

"For the consumer, they should be working under the assumption that their personal information has been compromised many times over. As an industry, until we can start making cyber crime unprofitable for adversaries, they will continue to hold the cards that will yield potentially massive payouts."