The Effect of a Public Announcement of a Company Data Breach over Time
Loading...
Date
2019-05
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Ohio State University
Abstract
Public announcements of data breaches do not affect all companies the same. Data security and hacking and their effect on companies have become popular subjects to study since the start of the 2000s. By measuring the cumulative abnormal return (CAR) of stocks, it has been found in previous studies that announcements of a data breach do negatively affect the stock’s return after the public announcement. The cumulative abnormal return is a finance term used to measure the impact of an event on a stock. To expand on past research, and to examine to see if there is any correlation between the year of the public announcement of a company data breach and the cumulative abnormal return, this paper measures the cumulative abnormal return of stocks that announced a data breach for the years 2005-2018. The data set consists of over 300 incidents of publicly traded companies that suffer data breaches from 2005-2018. The cumulative abnormal return for the year is plotted on a timeline and examined for any patterns. This paper examines how the effect of a data breach has affected companies’ stock returns over the fourteen years of data. In order to help determine if there has been a trend regarding investors’ opinions about data security over the years as it has become more prominent in everyday lives. It appeared that the year the data breach was announced did not have a significant effect over the timeline.
Description
Keywords
data security, data breach, cyber attack, data hack