Join us for the the Department of Sociology's fall 2022 VITAL lecture by Naniette H. Coleman (UC Berkeley) titled "Oops! How Corporations Anticipate, Apologize, and Forget Cybersecurity Breaches."

Abstract: Every publicly traded company in the United States is a digital company, composed of ever-increasing amounts of different types of data that have distinct protection requirements and levels of vulnerability. At a minimum to stay ahead of hackers, ransomware attacks, and insider threats, these organizations must know how much data they have, where those data exist, who has access to them, and how much outside vendors have access to the data. Despite widespread reporting on breaches in the United States, most companies appear woefully unprepared for the inevitable data breach that will befall them. Why is that the case? In this research, I seek to understand how corporations think about, take ownership of, and make amends for inevitable data breaches. To examine this phenomenon, I have collected data breach notification information from 14 state attorneys’ general offices, annual federal risk reports (10-k) from the Securities and Exchange Commission, and moment by moment stock prices from the New York Stock Exchange for all S&P 1500 companies from 2000-2021. The risk to publicly traded companies constantly evolves, especially given the multitude of actors who want to use data for purposes other than their original intention. In this sociological analysis of publicly traded companies, I seek to unravel how organizations conceptualize their risk before, during, and after data breaches occur and what effect those breaches have on their bottom-line, whether they are willing to admit that effect or not.

Naniette H. Coleman is a 2022 VITAL Scholar, a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California Berkeley, a Maverick-in-Residence at the Santa Fe Institute, and a multi-year UC-National Laboratory Graduate Fellow (Los Alamos). She was the first and is the only social scientist selected for this University of California-wide distinction in the history of the program. Coleman is also an affiliate of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues at Berkeley and two centers at Harvard University - Berkman Klein Center for the Internet and Society (2019-present) and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (2019-2021). Coleman’s research sits at the intersection of the sociology of culture and organizations and focuses on cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy in the US context. Specifically, Coleman’s research examines how organizations assess risk, make decisions, and respond to data breaches and organizational compliance with state, federal, and international privacy laws.