Corporate cyber defences fail in one third of hacks warns Accenture
Professional services specialists Accenture have warned of an ‘alarmingly high’ failure rate in corporate cyber defences in a new cyber security report, which finds that one-third of hacking attempts succeed.
Building Confidence: Facing the Cybersecurity Conundrum was compiled from the responses of 2,000 security officers representing global businesses and is intended to serve as a wakeup call to the corporate sector which still isn’t treating the problem seriously enough.
In it the authors write: “On average, an organization will face more than a hundred focused and targeted breach attempts every year, and respondents say one in three of these will result in a successful security breach. That’s two to three effective attacks per month.”
The ‘sheer volume’ of attacks also gives cause for concern alongside detection rates, with 17 per cent of respondents admitting it takes a year or longer to uncover successful breaches.
Accenture calculates that businesses now spend around $84bn annually to combat data theft, a crime that costs them a cumulative $2tn each year and rising, with some estimates putting losses as high as $90tn by 2030 if present trends continue.
High profile data breaches have hit Microsoft, Yahoo and Ashley Madison in recent months whilst denial of service attacks have brought down popular websites such as Twitter, Amazon and Spotify for hours at a time.