Every week comes a new report warning how vulnerable consumers, companies and government agencies are to hackers bent on breaching computer systems and extracting sensitive data.

This week came a somewhat unusual report, compiled by the global consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. It surveyed more than 9,000 executives in over 130 countries and found them confident in their ability to secure their information systems and bullish about cybersecurity spending. In the survey, released Thursday, 43 percent of respondents said they had confidence in their security protocols and 50 percent said they expected their companies to spend increasing amounts of money on cybersecurity.

Digital hubris can be dangerous, though.

PricewaterhouseCoopers parsed the data more closely. They asked the executives about the precautions they were taking. It turned out that only 13 percent of those surveyed had actually done what the consulting firm considered to be adequate — meaning they had an overall security strategy, they had reviewed the effectiveness of their strategy and they knew precisely the types of breaches that had already hit them over the last 12 months.

Even as the use of social networks has proliferated, barely one in three respondents said their companies had a policy governing their employees’ use of tools like Facebook and LinkedIn. Social media, the report’s authors concluded, is a double-edged sword for many companies.

via Executives May Be Too Confident on Cybersecurity, Survey Finds – NYTimes.com.

Every week comes a new report warning how vulnerable consumers, companies and government agencies are to hackers bent on breaching computer systems and extracting sensitive data.

This week came a somewhat unusual report, compiled by the global consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. It surveyed more than 9,000 executives in over 130 countries and found them confident in their ability to secure their information systems and bullish about cybersecurity spending. In the survey, released Thursday, 43 percent of respondents said they had confidence in their security protocols and 50 percent said they expected their companies to spend increasing amounts of money on cybersecurity.

Digital hubris can be dangerous, though.

PricewaterhouseCoopers parsed the data more closely. They asked the executives about the precautions they were taking. It turned out that only 13 percent of those surveyed had actually done what the consulting firm considered to be adequate — meaning they had an overall security strategy, they had reviewed the effectiveness of their strategy and they knew precisely the types of breaches that had already hit them over the last 12 months.

Even as the use of social networks has proliferated, barely one in three respondents said their companies had a policy governing their employees’ use of tools like Facebook and LinkedIn. Social media, the report’s authors concluded, is a double-edged sword for many companies.

via Executives May Be Too Confident on Cybersecurity, Survey Finds – NYTimes.com.