Organizations brace for cyber attacks despite improved preparedness

Cyber-risk levels have improved from “elevated” to “moderate” for the first time, but insiders represent a persistent threat for global organizations, according to Trend Micro.

Jon Clay, VP of threat intelligence at Trend Micro: “For the first time since we’ve been running these surveys, we saw the global cyber risk index not only improve but move into positive territory at +0.01. It means that organizations may be taking steps to improve their cyber-preparedness. There is still much to be done, as employees remain a source of risk. The first step to managing this is to gain complete and continuous attack surface visibility and control.”

The Cyber Risk Index (CRI) found that cyber-preparedness improved in Europe and APAC but declined slightly in North and Latin America over the past six months. At the same time, threats declined in every region bar Europe.

Most organizations are still pessimistic about their prospects over the coming year. The CRI found that most respondents said it was “somewhat to very likely” they’d suffer a breach of customer data (70%) or IP (69%) or a successful cyber-attack (78%).

These figures represent declines of just 1%, 2%, and 7%, respectively, from the last report.

The top four threats in the latest Cyber Risk Index

• Clickjacking
• Business Email Compromise (BEC)
• Ransomware
• Fileless attacks

“Botnets” replaced “login attacks” in fifth place.

Global respondents also named employees as representing three of their top five infrastructure risks:

• Negligent insiders
• Cloud computing infrastructure and providers
• Mobile/remote employees
• Shortage of qualified personnel
• Virtual computing environments (servers, endpoints)

Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of Ponemon Institute, said: “As the shift to hybrid working gathers momentum, organizations are rightly concerned about the risk posed by negligent employees and the infrastructure used to support remote workers. They will need to focus not only on technology solutions but people and processes to help mitigate these risks.”

The greatest areas of concern for businesses related to cyber-preparedness are:

• People: “My organization’s senior leadership does not view security as a competitive advantage.”
• Process: “My organization’s IT security function doesn’t have the ability to unleash countermeasures (such as honeypots) to gain intelligence about the attacker.”
• Technology: “My organization’s IT security function does not have the ability to know the physical location of business-critical data assets and applications.”