Corporate Boards Race to Shore Up Cybersecurity

After a series of high-profile data breaches and warnings, corporate boards are waking to cyberthreats, grappling with security issues they once relegated to technology experts.

So far this year, 1,517 companies traded on the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq Stock Market listed some version of the words cybersecurity, hacking, hackers, cyberattacks or data breach as a business risk in securities filings, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. That is up from 1,288 in all of 2013 and 879 in 2012. Still, federal officials and others say many companies remain ignorant of, and unprepared for, Internet intruders.