IBM's CEO On Hackers: 'Cyber Crime Is The Greatest Threat To Every Company In The World'

Ginni Rometty, IBM Corp.’s Chairman, President and CEO

The British insurance company Lloyd’s estimates that cyber attacks cost businesses as much as $400 billion a year, which includes direct damage plus post-attack disruption to the normal course of business. Some vendor and media forecasts put the cybercrime figure as high as $500 billion and more.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) says a significant portion of cybercrime goes undetected, particularly industrial espionage where access to confidential documents and data is difficult to spot.

Then there’s the hacks and breaches which go unreported by privately held and unregulated companies who are fearful of how cyber incidents will damage their reputations — which can have a negative impact on revenues, company valuation when raising capital, customer acquisition and retention, and their ability to recruit top talent.

Ginni Rometty, IBM Corp.’s Chairman, President and CEO, had the following to say, “We believe that data is the phenomenon of our time. It is the world’s new natural resource. It is the new basis of competitive advantage, and it is transforming every profession and industry. If all of this is true – even inevitable – then cyber crime, by definition, is the greatest threat to every profession, every industry, every company in the world.”

IBM has built up a big security business in response to the cybercrime epidemic. Rometty said IBM has created a Security Business Unit that marshals the knowledge of 6,000 experts.

According to IT research firm Gartner Inc., IBM Security is the fastest growing vendor in the security market with a 17% growth rate, and they are the third largest security software vendor with nearly $1.5 billion in revenues. Gartner has called IBM the largest security vendor selling exclusively to enterprises.

When speaking at the IBM Security Summit, Rometty she could have been mistaken for a CTO (chief technology officer). “We announced that more than 1,000 organizations across 16 industries are participating in our X-Force Exchange threat intelligence network. We only launched the network a month ago, so its rapid growth speaks to significant need. And we’re bringing a potent weapon to the fight – a 700 terabyte threat database including two decades of malicious cyberattack data from IBM’s security operations, as well as anonymous threat data from more than 4,000 organizations, which have contributed 300 new collections of data in the last month.”
Forbes: http://onforb.es/1MOYeYs