World Trade Center in association with Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) organized a virtual session on “Cybersecurity: Relevance and Role in Finance”. Mr. P.K. Ranganathan, CFO, Cyqurex Systems Pvt. Ltd was the Speaker. In his talk, Mr. Ranganathan mentioned the new trends emerging in cyber security like – Cloud Technology, BYOD, Rogue IT etc. He said that these trends are paving way for more frequent attacks with a wide range of motives be it economic, campaigns or hacktivists. He added that C-Suite, Board and Key staff are easy targets for hackers inside the organization. He described how hackers’ tactics has evolved over the years – now they do not ‘smash and grab’ but rather prefer to stay under the radar, evading security features like firewalls, antivirus, IDS/IPS etc. They are not just after the credit card data, but also will try to steal information from organization destroying their competitive capabilities. Mr. Ranganathan shared the result of the recent survey on CFOs and Cyber Security which said that none of the respondent organizations could completely avoid intrusions and 25% of them reported more than six intrusions. He said that since 2013, there have been 3,809,448 records stolen by data breaches. Hackers have targeted the healthcare industry the most last year with almost 75% of the industry being infected with malware. He added that an organization’s Cyber security is only as strong as it’s IT department – almost 95% of cyber attacks are the result of human error. He mentioned a few observations in hackers’ activities - apart from data, core systems like industrial controls are being hacked recently. Another trend is the data being changed or destroyed to breed distrust. He suggested a few methods to improve Cybersecurity for Finance leaders - Organizations need to evaluate and review the existing cyber incident response plan, CIOs and CFOs need to work together to improve the security, annual review of cyber security budgets and regular reports from senior management on privacy and security risks. Dr. Bose K. Nair, VP – World Trade Center and Ms. Lata Murli, Manager – Corporate Outreach India, Institute of Management Accountants also spoke.