More than half of European businesses (54 per cent) have faced at least one cyber-attack in the last 24 months which resulted in some sort of disruption in their activities. One in five, 20pc of IT decision makers (ITDMs) say that the attackers left no clue to their identity in the most recent cyber-attack to their organisation. This draws attention once again to the difficult task of cyber investigators, says the cyber product company Kaspersky Lab in its latest survey.
The most common outcomes of the attacks were: service disruption (31pc), data integrity issues (18pc) and data loss (15pc). Organisations in UK and Spain are facing the highest risks, with 64pc of respondents confirming such experiences in the past two years. Despite traditionally having bigger IT budgets compared to SMBs, 64pc of enterprises faced a cyberattack which lead to the above-mentioned outcomes, versus 45pc of SMBs.
This threat is not diminishing, the firm adds: over one in five respondents (21pc) say that the number of cyberattacks on their business has increased within the past 12 months, compared to the previous year, while for 42pc it roughly stayed the same. According to the firm, the complexity of cyberattacks is increasing too, with one-in-five IT decision makers saying that the threat actors attacking them left no clue to their identity during the most recent on their business.
With the amount of sensitive data in business, it is vital for organisations to discover a data breach immediately, to take the most effective incident response the company says. While it is good that over two thirds (72pc) of the surveyed organisations find out about a breach in eight hours or less, still 25pc of businesses fail to take action during the first hours after the attack as they do not realise they have been breached until later. As previous research found, the detection speed is crucial to lowering the financial impact of an attack – immediate detection means £456K cost of recovery, as compared to £1.2 million for enterprises that take more than a week to detect a threat that entered their cyber perimeter.
David Emm, principal security researcher at Kaspersky Lab UK, pictured, said: “It is alarming that more than half of businesses across Europe have suffered cyberattacks recently, which managed to disrupt their operations or cause other kids of damage. The fact that the odds of a business falling victim have increased dramatically should act as a stark warning for business owners and ITDMs to strengthen their defences.
“The results of the survey also confirm another trend that we, from the cybersecurity industry, have been pointing out for a while – that attackers sneak throughout the organisation and sometimes leave few or no traces, making the challenge for investigators increasingly difficult, as well as underlining the importance of co-operation among cyber-security professionals.”
