According to a study by cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf, business email compromise (BEC) is now the leading method of cyberattack.
Of the 1,000 senior IT and cybersecurity leaders surveyed from organizations in more than 15 countries, 70 percent said they had been the target of at least one business email breach (BEC). Nearly 30 percent reported being the victim of one or more successful BEC attacks. Twenty-one percent were able to thwart the attempt or attempts.
“Hackers are focusing on the human element, as evidenced by the over-targeting of business email compromise,” said Ian McShane, vice president of Managed Detection and Response (MDR) at Arctic Wolf.
Arctic Wolf’s 2024 Cybersecurity Trends Report found that 51% of respondents ranked ransomware as the top cyber security concern for the third consecutive year, while 45% reported having been attacked by ransomware in the past 12 months. The vast majority, 86%, said these attacks involved data exfiltration.
“Interestingly, only 57% of victims were informed about the data exfiltration by the ransomware. In their communications, these hackers included data leak prevention as part of the ransom demand,” Arctic Wolf said. “The remaining 28% of victims who acknowledged successful data exfiltration as part of their investigation into the incident were not informed by the perpetrators. In these cases, the perpetrators were likely planning a secondary extortion attempt, threatening to leak or otherwise maliciously use this stolen data.”
Arctic Wolf reported that the current average ransom demand is $600,000. Victim organizations paid either part or all of the ransom in 83% of cases. But there is another cost. Nearly all (94%) of those affected by ransomware experienced a period of significant downtime and productivity delays, with 40% reporting a period of complete work. Half of respondents reported that productivity was significantly impacted four months to more than a year after a successful attack.
Information source: insurancejournal.com
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