Companies May Be Unprepared For Cyber Attacks, Poll Finds

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A new poll has found that businesses may be woefully under-prepared for cyber attacks that could end up costing them dearly.

Ernst & Young's (EY) Global Information Security Survey 2013 found that 66 per cent of senior executives in the UK reported a five per cent increase in security incidents this year.

However, only four per cent said they thought they were sufficiently prepared to battle cyber attacks – the remaining 96 per cent admitted their security functions may not be strong enough to cope.

More than two-thirds cited budget constraints as the main reason for this, while a similar proportion blamed a lack of skilled resources.

EY information security director Mark Brown said that businesses face the problem of when they will be targeted, rather than if – and a reactive approach that deals with the outcome is not going to be enough.

"Organisations must undertake more proactive thinking, with tone-from-the-top support. Greater emphasis on improving employee awareness, increasing budgets and devoting more resources to innovating security solutions is needed," he added.

In August, a report from Arbor Networks also found that distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on businesses are on the increase, with at least 2,500 taking place worldwide each day.

DDoS focuses on deliberately overloading servers to crash them or slow them down and such attacks can be the perfect smokescreen for criminals seeking to steal data.

According to Neustar, 22 per cent of British firms experienced a disruptive attack on their IT infrastructure during 2012, with 37 per cent lasting longer than a day. That adds up to a lot of wasted time and productivity, whether anything was actually stolen or not.

Businesses that want to protect themselves but don't have a dedicated IT team could consider contacting Storetec to discuss online hosting and document protection.

Storetec News/Blogs. "http://www.storetec.net/news-blog/companies-may-be-unprepared-for-cyber-attacks-poll-find/". Companies May Be Unprepared For Cyber Attacks, Poll Finds.

Novemeber 1, 2013. Storetec.