Cyber attacks keep happening and the cost to businesses keeps rising. The latest data from the Ponemon Institute indicated cyber attacks cost U.S. businesses nearly double what they did four years ago, with the average cost of a security breach being $12.7 million. CCTV America’s Mark Niu reported from California about some contributing factors as well as innovative efforts to minimize the damage.

A survey from computer accessory and security company Kensington sheds light on a growing trend at the workplace, called BYOD (bring your own device). Fifty-nine percent of enterprises approve the use of personal devices for work, but 73 percent of organizations said it creates greater security risks.

“An IT director is gonna look at the bring-your-own-device entering the environment on a corporate network with pause, because how do they manage to secure the access of the data on a device they do not own,” the vice president of Kensington, Ben Thacker said.

Kensington creates locking devices for laptops and is also working on physical and sensor based technology that would prevent mobile theft too.

“A good corporate security policy is gonna cover everything from the cloud all the way to the end point or the edge device,” said Thacker.

Some cyber security companies said the traditional method of building a wall to keep out cyber attacks was an unwinnable war.

“Most of the cyber security is focusing on network security, trying to keep the data safe. We think that battle is already lost as we’ve seen by recent breaches, so our approach is how do we make that data not valuable in the hands of a cyber criminal,” Alisdair Faulkner, the chief products officer of ThreatMetrix, said.

Through its trusted intelligence network, Threatmatrix protects some of the biggest e-commerce sites in the U.S. and some of the biggest payment companies in China.

Faulkner said, on e-commerce sites, about 3-5 percent of transactions were instantly detected as fraud. He also said a growing problem was hackers attempting to takeover online accounts, something that happens once in every 20 logins.

ThreatMetrix figured out whether it’s a human transacting or logging in, where it’s coming from, and whether the user or device has been seen in their network before.

“What we’ve built is a global trusting intelligence network where we allow companies to anonymously share information about trusted users and cyber threats. That’s what truly unique, because we feel that if you are gonna fight a network, you need a network. Otherwise you are going to be a sitting duck,” Faulkner said.

Faulkner said during the Black Friday shopping holiday period, phone and tablet transactions doubled from a year ago, further emphasizing that the new face of a cyber attack has increasingly gone to mobile.

Gary Miliefsky from SnoopWall talks about cyber attacks

To talk more about cyber attacks, CCTV America’s Michelle Makori talked with Gary Miliefsky, the founder of SnoopWall in Newton, Massachusetts.