Businesses Are Overconfident About Cyber Security

For the last couple of years, cybersecurity has been making headlines around the world. From matters of national security, to widespread ransomware attacks that have crippled hospitals and businesses alike, to the Equifax breach that affected millions of private citizens, it’s become evident that cyber threats are nothing to sneeze at.

While the world has begun looking at cyber attacks and other types of cybercrime more seriously, it would appear that measures to prevent them aren’t being taken seriously enough. SolarWinds MSP’s 2017 Cybersecurity Preparedness survey found that an overwhelming number of businesses in both the U.S. and U.K. are actually overestimating how ready their organizations are when it comes to preventing and combatting breaches. The survey contains responses from professionals representing 400 businesses, equally split across the US and UK, and between SMBs and enterprise organizations. SolarWinds found that:

• 87 percent of businesses are “confident” in their cybersecurity preparedness
• 59 percent of businesses actually believe they are safer this year than they were last year
• 61 percent of businesses think they’ll be safer and stronger next year as they see growth in their cybersecurity budgets.

This confidence isn’t a bad thing on its own. If 87 percent of businesses actually were prepared to effectively thwart and respond to cyberattacks, that would be great — unfortunately, SolarWinds’ second set of numbers shows that this confidence is misplaced. The report also found that, in the last 12 months:

• 31 percent of businesses reported incidents of DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks or fraud
• 31 percent of businesses reported a malicious insider attack
• 28 percent of businesses reported a ransomware attack
• A whopping 71 percent of businesses experienced at least one breach, which is up from 29 percent in the year prior

If we do the math, only 29 percent of businesses weren’t hit with a breach in the last year. At best, if each of those businesses (29 percent) also answered that they were confident in their cybersecurity preparedness (87 percent), that means that at least 58 percent of businesses hit with one or more breaches in the last year also rated themselves “confident” in their preparedness against them.

Those with analytical minds will recognize that it’s entirely possible that those hit by cyber attacks last year may have upgraded technology or increased staffing in response to the breach, lending credibility to why they might feel more confident in their cybersecurity preparedness now — but the rest of the SolarWinds report shows that this simply isn’t the case.

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Article Credit: Business 2 Community

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