The victims of successful hacking attacks amounted to 71% of organizations for the year 2014, according to the 2015 Cyberthreat Defense Report.
The CyberEdge Group published an interesting report, entitled “2015 Cyberthreat Defense Report”, and according to the corresponding studies, it confirms the increase in the number of successful cyber attacks against organizations.
The report analyzed data provided by 814 organizations, which was collected by surveying IT security leaders and professionals in 19 industries across North America and Europe.
71% of respondents confirmed that their organization had been compromised by a successful cyberattack in the past year, up from 62% the previous year. More concerning is the data related to multiple cyberattacks suffered by organizations, with 22% stating that their organization experienced six or more successful cyberattacks in a row.
According to experts, one of the main reasons for the increase in the number of cyber attacks is the level of sophistication of attack tactics. Phishing, malware and zero-day attacks are the main attack methods.
Below are some interesting findings of the research related to cyberattacks against organizations:
- "Including all social media applications, all endpoint devices of every type – but especially mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are characterized as the most vulnerable points of defense of most organizations"
- “Although they are among the top solutions predicted for the coming year, many of the “next-generation” technologies that are likely to be more effective against advanced malware and targeted attacks, such as security analytics, network behavior analysis, and cyberthreat intelligence services, are showing modest adoption rates by organizations.”.
- “More than a third of IT security teams today lack the tools required to investigate SSL-encrypted web threat traffic or exfiltrationofsensitive data.”
- “Only a quarter of IT security professionals are confident that their organizations are doing enough to monitor the operation of privileged user accounts for any signs of abuse.”
- “Adoption rates of key technologies and practices that significantly reduce the scope of an attack on a network—such as managing the security architecture and conducting full network scans more frequently than every three months—remain modest.”
- "Less than 20% of IT security professionals are confident about the size of the investment made by their organizations to educate employees about phishing attacks.".
- "Two-thirds of organizations recognize that the anti-malware system they currently use to secure their endpoint devices ultimately does not provide adequate protection.".
