Across industries, companies have been intensifying their focus on cybersecurity. This is a direct consequence of the expanding role that digitization is playing in their business and operating models and the demonstrated potential for significant damage resulting from a successful cyberattack.

Criminals go where they can do the most damage with minimal effort. It's why, for years, hackers targeted Windows rather than Macs - it was where the users, and in turn the data, were. And now we're seeing a steady migration from one platform to the next as popularity grows. Hackers moved from Windows to Apple's OS to mobile. Now, unsurprisingly, they are targeting the cloud.

In the evolving supply chain, technology has allowed for more rapid and productive dissemination of critical information between organizational partners upstream and downstream. While this increased flexibility, scalability and efficiency of operations provides economies of scale and scope on the revenue and expense side for businesses, the tradeoff becomes a burgeoning access terminal for cybercriminals to poach critical intelligence flows.

Retail is still under attack and consequently the security effectiveness of retail organizations as a whole has continued to decline over the past year. However, almost 75 percent of retailers that experienced a data breach in the last year have improved their security effectiveness since the point of their breach, while a third of the breached retailers link back to compromises via third-party vendors.

It's past time for all major companies – certainly in the Fortune 500, but the advice carries on down into even medium-sized organizations – to carve out a C-level role focusing solely on security.

Shopper distrust following a series of retail data breaches is high - three in 10 shoppers say they don't trust retailers to protect personal and financial data against cyber criminals.