National master thesis award to Jansen and Stavik

Embla Kleiv Jansen (left) and Stine-Mari Stavik (Photo: Unsplash (Mika Baumeister) / private).
Embla Kleiv Jansen (left) and Stine-Mari Stavik (Photo: Unsplash (Mika Baumeister) / private).

10 December 2021 10:48

National master thesis award to Jansen and Stavik

Embla Jansen and Stine-Mari Stavik are the winners of the ISACA Norway Chapters award for best master's thesis. They have examined how the stock market reacted to 42 of the world's largest hacks.

In their ISACA award winning master thesis entitled What the Hack? An Empirical Analysis of the Stock Market Reactions to Hacking Announcements, Jansen and Stavik look at the role of consumers and regulatory authorities when it comes to inflicting financial consequences on companies that have been hacked.

They find an average negative stock market reaction of 1.7% on the first trading day following the announcement of the hacks - and that the stock prices do not fully recover within the following ten days, indicating that shareholder value is at risk. Furthermore, larger hacks seem to be associated with larger falls in stock value.

However, Jansen and Stavik do not find evidence of stronger stock market reactions after the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018, despite the fact that the GDPR has raised the maximum fines for companies that are hacked.

- We are not the first to investigate this, but we are the first to do so with the world's largest data attack in recent times where personal data was leaked. By putting a price tag on computer attacks, we wanted to make the management of companies aware of the trade-off between investing in computer security and bear the cost of being hacked, Stavik says in an interview (in Norwegian).

Jansen and Stavik were supervised by Steffen Juranek (Department of Business and Management Science and Centre for Business Economics) and Carsten Bienz (Department of Finance and Centre for Business Economics).