When Growth Opportunities Meet Cybersecurity Risk: A Topic Modeling Approach

Using textual analysis to capture firms' business prospects, this paper examines whether firms with high growth prospects are more vulnerable to cybersecurity risk, whether breaches impact growth firms' investment cycles, and how growth firms can protect against data breaches. Our findings suggest that firms with high growth prospects are greater targets for data breaches and provide compelling evidence that the particular firm characteristics that are hallmarks of growth firms may open those firms to greater cybersecurity risk. Further, our findings suggest that high growth firms maintain a robust investment cycle, despite experiencing a data breach, consistent with the growth mindset that these firms adopt. Finally, we provide evidence that growth firms with higher IT awareness can better defend themselves from cyber attacks.