The top five long-term effects of the Target breach

When news broke recently that three banks had rejected Mastercard’s $19 million settlement with Target over claims stemming from the retailer’s massive data breach, it served as a reminder that the impact of a major hack are often enduring. Indeed, the discarded settlement is just one of numerous long-lasting effects of the Target hack, including:

1. New cybersecurity legislation: The Target breach was the first of many high-profile hacks that started the process of raising awareness and concern about the state of cybersecurity. These breaches garnered attention from politicians as well, including President Obama, who proposed cybersecurity legislation that has already been passed by the House of Representatives.

2. Re-evaluation of SOC processes: The long line of data breaches that began with Target resulted in a re-examination of the way information security professionals do their jobs. Increasingly, organizations are recognizing that attempting to manually investigate and respond to every security alert is not sustainable when detection solutions are producing thousands of alerts every day. As a result, automated incident response—whereby organizations leverage tools that automatically prioritize, analyze and resolve alerts at machine speed—is becoming an increasingly popular concept in SOCs.

3. More attention from the C-suite: The carnage resulting from the Target breach caused many executives to reconsider where cybersecurity ranked on their list of priorities. That makes perfect sense considering that the company’s former CEO, Gregg Steinhafel was forced to resign soon after news of the hack broke.

4. Increased security spending: As cybersecurity awareness began to rise, the amount of money organizations were willing to invest in solutions rose as well. The Federal Government plans to increase spending by approximately 10 percent in 2016 and numerous corporations in the private sector have ramped up their financial commitments as well.

5. Concern for the future: Perhaps the most significant effect of the Target breach and subsequent hacks was the impact it had on the public’s collective psyche. Many consumers and businesses alike are extremely concerned how safe their data is and in some cases are making purchasing decisions based on vendors’ record of protecting information.

Are you looking for a way to improve your organization’s information security capabilities? Request a demo today for a close-up view of how automated incident response looks in action.

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