The results are in. Britain’s businesses need to get better at protecting themselves from cyber criminals. The UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s annual Cyber Security Breaches Survey seeks to uncover business attitudes toward cyber security and the nature and impact of breaches. So what picture emerges when focusing on medium and large businesses?
The results strongly support the oft-repeated message – ‘It’s when, not if, you get breached’. Nearly 70% of medium and large businesses reported breaches or attacks in the last year. Phishing was by far the most frequent attack with 72% falling foul to them.
Ransomware is a new category of attack this year and is already at fourth place, with 17% reporting having been hit with ransomware demands. Some businesses feel they’re at low risk because they have little ‘valuable’ data, e.g. customer credit cards and bank accounts. And while it remains true that firms holding customer data suffered more breaches, the rise of ransomware shows the data only has to be valuable to you to be of interest to criminals.