The digital transformation of the last two decades has placed cybersecurity front and center on the CEO agenda. Customers now place vast quantities of personal information into the hands of businesses, with the expectation of a certain amount of privacy and confidentiality in exchange. The ability to meet this expectation is crucial in order for a business to retain customers and build its brand.

So, what does 2017 have in store for the security industry? While there’s no crystal ball that can tell us for sure, we’ve got our eye on a few key trends.

Entering a new year, we always take a look at what the latest in identity and access management  (IAM) and cybersecurity threats means for the security industry. This year, we specifically focused on answering three key questions:

A recent survey conducted by Accenture found that over the past year, roughly one in three targeted attacks resulted in an actual security breach. When you consider that the average company faces more than one hundred focused attacks launched against them every year, these numbers are alarming. This equates to more than 30 successful data breaches every year against a single company, with just one data breach having the potential to result in millions of dollars in losses.

*Disclaimer: This article originally appeared on IDG Connect. 

Over the past few years, Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) have become three of the hottest topics in Information Technology circles. The growing demand for compliance with federal and state laws, as well as industry best practices, has necessitated a closer look at IT governance, as well as solutions that help to ensure an organization has invested their time and efforts wisely, through management and implementation of such technologies as access control, data protection, and identity provisioning and management. Proper design, application, and usage of these key technologies (and others) help to control necessary risk management activities and ease the efforts that are required to remediate or address areas where compliance is lacking. 

*Disclaimer: This article originally appeared in SecurityWeek. 

*Disclaimer: This article originally appeared in eSchool News. 

Student data privacy is quite a different topic from the headlines most people read concerning data breaches. It is not about malicious intruders hacking or stealing credentials to get into a system to steal corporate intellectual property or records to sell on the dark web. Student data privacy concerns, specifically, center on the misuse of personally identifiable information, known by its acronym PII.

In a recent analysis of the top 1,000 global companies, 97 percent were found to have had leaked credentials that were made publicly available on the Web. While this statistic is disturbing enough by itself, what is more troublesome is how that information is captured and made public.

Many leaked credentials come as the result of an organization suffering from a data breach, but another method that attackers are using is to steal credentials from a third-party source, similar to what happened when Spotify and Pandora were attacked. In both of these incidents, corporate emails used to sign up for accounts were either published or sold. Dating and adult websites are also common places where corporate emails are inappropriately used to create accounts, resulting in more than 300,000 corporate or government worker email addresses being exposed.

One of the most concerning trends for 2016 seems to be "Another day, another healthcare data breach." Breaches are becoming an all too regular occurrence and not just among healthcare providers. Retailers, credit and financial institutions, entertainment giants, and even governmental agencies are falling prey to the hackers, and in many cases are allowing access to very private customer data, at an alarming rate.

Quick. Think fast! Which industry is the most under attack by cybercriminals?

If you guessed the financial sector, which has historically been the most targeted industry, then it’s time to update your understanding of today’s cybersecurity threats because retail has taken the top spot, according to 2016 NTT research.