Abstract

Instances of information security breaches are wide ranging, and can affect companies of different industries and sizes. We investigate the impact of publicly announced information security breaches of public organizations on their competitors that are comparable in size and operate in the same industry. This is called intra-industry information transfer, and has not been subject to extensive research in IS. We use matched-sampling methodology to measure the difference in firm performance using financial ratios, and interpret the results using paired samples t and Wilcoxon matched pair tests. Our results present a departure from intuition regarding the efficacy of security breaches on firm performance even though we do find an instance of information transfer.

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