You will have seen from our cover that The Treasurer looks this month at the dark arts, or, in language more familiar to the corporate world, cybersecurity. Commentators are describing the attack last month on telecoms group TalkTalk as a wake-up call, a warning that corporates are now hugely at risk of near-inevitable, large-scale hacks resulting perhaps not in immediate financial loss, but ransom demands, to say nothing of massive hits to their reputations. The attack, thought initially to be the work of a criminal gang using techniques well known among hackers, is now laid at the door – somewhat incredibly – of a 15-year-old boy, who, it is alleged, accessed the details of up to four million customers. In our feature on page 18, business and finance journalist Christian Doherty spells out the problem. Holding payment card details and processing card transactions is undoubtedly a risky business, but the trend towards extortion attempts cannot be ignored any longer. Survey after survey – and we highlight one in our briefing pages on page 8 – have warned that organisations do not take their cybersecurity sufficiently seriously. As well as ransom demands, carefully researched forged emails from senior executives that appear to authorise wire transfers, so-called spear phishing, are a growing problem. These are no longer theoretical risks or occasional incidents on the periphery. They are mainstream and need to be taken as a given. Take a look at our feature for an assessment of where treasury should be involved. Given the potential scale of these incidents, along with the need to negotiate all the other challenges that the business world throws at us, it is perhaps time organisations looked at the collective resilience of their people. Whether to help employees address operational setbacks, M&As or their greater corporate governance responsibilities, resilience is becoming the issue of the moment among HR departments and executives. Turn to page 42 for a piece by Geetu Bharwaney, business coach and author, on how to cultivate it. On page 24, Ben Poole profiles Pedro Madeira, who, as group treasurer of Thames Tideway Tunnel, has been given the fascinating task of creating a treasury function from scratch. We look at emerging markets, too, in this issue. On page 30, for instance, we have an account of the realities of doing business in the post-war fragility that is Iraq. Harsh economic realities and security issues don’t come any more basic than this. I hope you enjoy the issue.
