BB&T CEO Kelly King recently sat down with Information Security Media Group for an exclusive interview where he stated, “the most important advice I could give to any CEO in any industry is to make sure that they and their executive team and their board, are aware of their risk. If you don’t know the risk, you can’t develop a strategy to mitigate the risk. And in dealing with cybersecurity, information is critical and timing is everything.”
King leads BB&T, which has $186.8 billion in assets and has seen its cybersecurity budget double in the last two to three years. King is a proponent of cyberthreat information sharing among banks and knows that you can’t erase the threat “but you can mitigate it… you must spend the money to do this.”
King believes that “budgeting for defenses aimed at mitigating the impact of cyber-attacks is every CEO’s obligation. As the level and sophistication of attacks has escalated, so, too, has the need for CEOs to step up and take responsibility.”