Unfortunately there are so many cases I can use to illustrate this. Most topical at this time at the start of autumn (fall) 2017 is Equifax.
They provide credit scoring services to the public and businesses in 14 countries, including Canada, UK and USA. Many financial organisations use them to assess the credit-worthiness of individuals and companies.
This company has been around for more than 100 years, they have an operating revenue of over 3 billion USD and over 9000 employees.
Their bread and butter is information. Personal information. Including name, addresses, social security number, income and loans amongst others. Stuff classed as sensitive PII by most if not all data protection agencies.
They hold data on more than 820 million individuals and 91 million businesses.
In May 2017, they lost the details of which 145 million people in the USA, at least 400000 in the UK and 100000 in Canada.
Heads Roll
Within Equifax, the chief information officer Susan Mauldin and chief security officer David Webb were retiring and within two weeks Richard Smith, the CEO said he was stepping down after having to explain the breach to a US Congress committee in October.
The market is not impressed
Their share price was trading around 140 USD, then plunged to a low of 94 USD a few days after the disclosure, which is comparable to Talktalk’s share price drop.
The actual financial impact to Equifax is unknown at this time, as it’s still so recent.
It gets worse
During a congressional hearing, it transpired that the CIO, Jun Ying had sold 950k USD of company shares. June 2019, he was found
guilty of insider trading and sentenced to 4 months in prison
and ordered to pay restitution amounting to 120M USD, as well as a 55K USD fine.
As of 13/05/19: This incident has cost the firm 1.4 B USD so far