A trend of cyber-attacks and data breaches at top retailers have recently seen an upsurge, but a cybersecurity expert had deemed the practice as "inevitable" in an interview broadcast Sunday night, The Hill reported.
Over the past year, cyber-attacks on customer payment card data have been carried out on various major retailers, including Home Depot, Target and Michaels and Neiman Marcus, as well as the restaurant chain P.F. Chang's. In October, JPMorgan announced that 76 million of the company's customers had been hacked.
"Nearly every company ... is vulnerable," Dave DeWalt, Fire Eye's chief executive, told "60 Minutes" on Sunday. "Even the strongest banks in the world - banks like JPMorgan, retailers like Home Depot, retailers like Target can't spend enough money or hire enough people to solve this problem."
"This isn't a lack of effort. Most of the large companies are growing their security spend - yet 97 percent, literally 97 percent, of all companies are getting breached," he added.
Professional cyber criminals behind the big breaches are acting as a "new-age cartel," Ed Lowery, who heads the division of the U.S. Secret Service that investigates financial cyber crimes, told the program.
Last month, a cyber-attack breached the computer networks of the United States Postal Service and compromised personal information of more than 800,000 employees, Reuters reported. It was suspected to have been carried out by Chinese government hackers.
The breach, which was discovered in mid-September and is being investigated by the FBI, compromised employees' names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, addresses, beginning and end dates of employment and emergency contact information, the Postal Service said
It takes 229 days, on average, to discover a security breach, which are most often blamed on poor passwords, according to DeWalt.
"The days when we have our username and password, which is our son or daughter's name or our cat or our dog is not enough security ... for today's attackers," he said. "Breaches are inevitable. It's happening. It's just life that we live in today."
"They're going to get in," DeWalt added. "But don't let them access the information that's really important. Don't let them get back out with that information. Detect it sooner. Respond sooner. And ultimately that exposure is very small. Maybe they got away with a few credit cards. Maybe they didn't get away with any credit cards. But they didn't steal 56 million of them or 40 million of them."
Meanwhile, the U.S. president's residence was also not spared in October. White House's unclassified computer networks were suspected to have been breached by hackers working for the Russian government, according to a report by The Washington Post.
