What’s Your Cybersecurity DQ?

For years the measure of someone’s intellect was the Intelligence Quotient or IQ. And anything over 130 was considered high. Growing up I recall there was a girl who lived on the next block who was rumored to have scored 180 as an 11-year old.

Needless to say I was never in any of her classes.

But as time wore on, it was discovered that such things as “environmental factors” can influence someone’s score by 20 points. That must have been why my teacher wrote “see me after class” on my test paper.

Today, with the advent of all things technological, there’s something called a DQ – or digital quotient, which measures your IT IQ so to speak. In a 2014 study conducted by a U.K.-based consulting firm it found that the average adult has a DQ of 96. By contrast, the average six-year-old had a DQ of 98.

I have never been completely comfortable in the tech arena, but with all the new advances encroaching (blockchain, AI, robotics) it has prompted us as a company to expand past our comfort zone of the CPA community and look at pairing our core clients with the higher end advisory and consulting services – HR and medical consulting, family offices, BPO and of course cybersecurity.

Over the past several years, we’ve all read about the massive data breaches suffered by retailing giants like Target and Home Depot, which collectively had more than 100 million customers’ information pirated by hackers, not to mention the losses suffered by Anthem Insurance, Yahoo and Equifax.

According to a report by identity theft protection specialist Norton Security, Americans lost just shy of $15 billion to cyber hackers in 2017. To put that figure in perspective, that’s the total U.S. revenue generated by Big Four firm PwC last year.

That was the result of anything from a massive cyber breach to a simple phishing email, where a message appears to be from a legitimate source like a bank or credit card company and simply requests that you re-enter personal information for security purposes.

In fact last year I received just such an email purportedly from the Bank of America claiming that they had lost my account numbers and could I be so kind as to forward that information to them. I was impressed, the logo and page looked authentic with one exception – upon further review it was from the Bank of Ameriac.

Something apparently was lost in Balkan translation.

I didn’t need a high cyber DQ to know to delete that ASAP.