The Relationship Between The Cost Of Cybercrime And Web Security Posture: A Case Study On Belgian Companies

As the web rapidly expands and gets integrated into all kinds of business, cyber security has become increasingly important for companies. In order to defend against the rising web attacks, several advanced security mechanism have been proposed, with varying degree of adoption. The presence of these mechanisms on a website can be used as an indicator of the security awareness and practices of that website. A step further, it can be argued that the adoption of advanced security practices by a website not only secures the web presence, but is also proxy for the quality of the companies security management practice in general. So organisations with a secure presence should ultimately suffer less losses due to security incidents. In this paper, we present first results regarding this hypothesis. To achieve this, we simultaneously investigated the impact of cybercrime on Belgian companies and the adoption of security mechanisms on companies' websites. Through a correlation analysis, we found that companies with better web security defence tend to have less business loss and reputation damage caused by web attacks.