Here’s how much money they’re making
European businesses are increasingly appointing Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) to their boards and awarding them pay packets of over €1m (£850k) for the role as cyber-security becomes an increasingly important boardroom issue, says DHR International, the global executive search firm.
The last five years has a rapid increase both in the number of cyber-attacks but also the financial damage done by successful cyber-attacks. It’s estimated that in Q2 2016 there were over 55 million cybercrime attacks across Europe, a 66 per cent increase on the same quarter in 2015. (Source: Threat Matrix).
The recent ‘WannaCry’ ransomware attack is a particularly high profile example, which saw tens of thousands of businesses’ data in over 150 countries held ransom by hackers.
At small- midsized listed companies in Europe the average pay for CISOs generally falls between €200k (£171k) and €300k (£256k), and at larger listed companies CISOs could be paid from €700k (£597k) to €1m (£853k).
Gert Stürzebecher, Partner at DHR International, comments: “CEOs have started to lose their jobs over data breaches and the financial impact of some individual data breaches now runs into the tens or hundreds of millions of euros.
“An issue as serious as that gets its own seat at the board.
“Every corporate wants to avoid being the first major company put out of business by a cyber-attack that has got out of control.”
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