Experience and research has enabled Lowers Risk Group to identify many ways companies can reduce or prevent fraud while protecting the organization’s most valued assets:
1. Set the “Tone from the Top”
Managers and owners of small-medium sized businesses should focus their control investments on the most cost-effective mechanisms, such as setting an ethical “tone from the top” for their employees, as well as those most likely to help prevent and detect the specific fraud schemes that pose the greatest risks to their businesses. … Continue reading
In today’s digital era, news travels quickly across social media and offers high and immediate visibility to headlines that may affect a brand’s reputation. Product recalls, data breaches, systems failures, poor customer support, compliance failures—it’s all out in the open. As such, reputational risk has become a distinct category within the framework of enterprise risk management. Meanwhile, information technology has a vital role to play in organizations around the world as the driver of the digital era. IT touches all aspects of business operations, communication, customer engagement, and commerce.
IBM’s 2012 Global Reputational Risk and IT Study, conducted in June 2012 by the Economist Intelligence Unit, garnered responses from 427 senior executives from around the world. The results show a strong connection between IT risk and reputational risk, centering on three key IT responsibilities: Security, business continuity, and technical support. Security-related issues, such as data breaches that threaten personal information or credit card data, was also named as the number one IT risk posing threats to reputation.
Looking Beyond the Rearview Mirror
One of the most profound findings of the IBM study is that many companies still take a reactive approach to IT risk management. These organizations are dedicating resources to managing risks such as data breaches, system failures, and data backup failure only after they experience a significant issue. Emerging risks that have yet to cause serious reputational damage have simply not been addressed properly.
Many others – 64% of respondents – say their organizations will focus more on managing reputational risk than they did five years ago. Still, the study finds that executives tend to make sweeping assumptions about their organizations’ security and resiliency related to IT risks—generally considering themselves better protected than they actually are.
The following infographic from IBM summarizes the results of its 2012 reputational risk and IT study.
The team of IT risk managers at Lowers Risk Group can help you build strong and secure IT department that protects against the risks of technology, compliance, and reputation.
Uncertainty is and always has been the issue of contention for risk managers. But the degree and range of global uncertainty faced by organizations around the world is truly unprecedented. Events that have occurred since the 2001 terrorist attacks point to levels and areas of risk many had never before imagined. Natural disasters, acts of terror, corporate governance scandals, the dot-com collapse, the housing bubble burst—events like these and the uncertainty they have injected into the world have caused organizations to place a greater and broader emphasis on risk management.
More than ever, the focus is on being proactive, instead of reactive. … Continue reading
Emerging risks—both new risks and familiar risks in unfamiliar conditions—have taken on new meaning and importance in today’s increasingly uncertain world. As the unimaginable global impact of events such as the euro crisis, the subprime mortgage crisis, the tsunami in Japan, the Arab spring uprisings, Hurricane Sandy, flooding in Thailand, and other events caused damage beyond what could have been predicted, emerging risks have earned the attention of executives and board members in corporations around the world. … Continue reading
Defined as the intentional act of trickery to unlawfully obtain funds from an ATM, most people associate ATM fraud with external crime, where the card or card number and associated PIN are illegally obtained by outside individuals, gangs, or even more sophisticated organized crime syndicates. Considered a form of identity theft by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), while identity theft had been holding relatively steady for the last few years, the FTC cites a 20 percent increase in ATM fraud in 2011 alone.
From the onset of the proliferation in the use of ATMs, less sophisticated (but equally effective) methods of ATM fraud include such means as card trapping, skimming, and keypad overlays. Trapping, as the name implies, is where the customer’s card is somehow trapped by the perpetrator only to be retrieved later. Skimming is where the perpetrator has put a device over the card slot of an ATM, which reads the magnetic strip as the user unknowingly passes his card through it. These devices require the use of a miniature camera (inconspicuously attached to the ATM) to read the user’s PIN at the same time.
Experience and research has enabled Lowers Risk Group to identify many ways companies can reduce or prevent fraud while protecting the organization’s most valued assets:
Uncertainty is and always has been the issue of contention for risk managers. But the degree and range of global uncertainty faced by organizations around the world is truly unprecedented. Events that have occurred since the 2001 terrorist attacks point to levels and areas of risk many had never before imagined. Natural disasters, acts of terror, corporate governance scandals, the dot-com collapse, the housing bubble burst—events like these and the uncertainty they have injected into the world have caused organizations to place a greater and broader emphasis on risk management.
Emerging risks—both new risks and familiar risks in unfamiliar conditions—have taken on new meaning and importance in today’s increasingly 