CYBER SECURITY | 3.5 MIN READ
Cyber crime is on the rise for the foreseeable future. Hackers are wreaking havoc on companies both large and small, stealing private information and crippling networks. The cost of a cyber attack can be staggering. Last year, a company running multiple up-to-date security measures lost over $550,000 simply because of an employee error that left them vulnerable to a phishing attack. We receive calls about phishing attacks every day, which shows the rate at which cyber attacks are occurring.
Read the following cyber security statistics to get a glimpse into what the current cyber crime landscape looks like.
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Cyber Security Ventures Findings
How Can I Protect My Company from Cyber Security Threats?
Sophos, one of our IT partners here at Standard Office Systems, surveyed 3,100 IT decision makers to see the common issues they face in terms of cyber crime threats as well as the strength of their company's cyber security efforts.
The following facts condense some of the main findings from Sophos' survey.
1. 2 in 3 of the surveyed organizations fell victim to a cyber attack in 2018.
2. Of the 3,100 IT decision makers located worldwide that they surveyed, 9 in 10 were running up-to-date cyber security measures at the time of their most significant attack.
3. 50% of the surveyed IT managers consider phishing emails to be a top-three security threat.
4. Of those surveyed, 41% of the cyber attacks an IT manager dealt with were from data breaches.
5. Of those surveyed, managing cyber security internally takes a week of company time each month.
6. 86% of respondents say they need greater cyber security skills in their organization.
RELATED: How to Train Employees About Cyber Security
IBM regularly conducts studies about cyber crime and cyber intelligence through both its Ponemon Institute and its X-Force Intelligence. The following findings are compiled from the 2019 Ponemon Institute study as well as IBM's X-Force Intelligence group.
7. The average size of a data breach is 25,575 records.
8. In 2019, the healthcare industry had the most expensive data breaches.
9. Over the last three years, more than 11.7 billion records and over 11 Terabytes of data were leaked or stolen in publicly disclosed incidents.
10. The finance and insurance sector has been the most-attacked industry for three years in a row, with 19 percent of total attacks and incidents in 2018.
11. Human errors such as mis-configured cloud servers, unsecured cloud databases, and improperly secured sync backups were responsible for 43% of publicly disclosed mis-configuration incidents.
Cyber Security Ventures puts out annual reports detailing cyber crime statistics. The following data shows some of the most intriguing findings from their 2019 Official Annual Cybercrime report.
12. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that cyber crime will cost the world in excess of $6 trillion annually by 2021, up from $3 trillion in 2015.
13. Cyber security Ventures predicts that a business will fall victim to a ransomware attack every 14 seconds by 2019, and every 11 seconds by 2021.
14. The most under-spent sector of the cyber security industry is training employees how to recognize and defend against cyber attacks.
15. Global spending on security awareness training for employees is predicted to reach $10 billion by 2027.
If a hacker gains access to your network, the results could be a disastrous domino effect. After reading the previous statistics, you might be a little apprehensive about how safe your company is from hackers.
Though cyber crime can sound like a complex issue to tackle, there are some simple solutions your company can use to strengthen its cyber security efforts.
If you want a more comprehensive method of protecting your company online, consider managed IT services. Managed services take a layered approach to cyber security by keeping software and hardware current, backing-up critical data, and proactively monitoring your network to prevent a security breach.
If you're a small business, you might think that you will never be the victim of a cyber attack, as hackers would seek bigger targets. However, that thinking is a common misconception, seeing as small businesses are increasingly becoming targets and over 4,000 businesses are breached every day.
Don't wait until you're attacked to ramp up your cyber security efforts. Proactive solutions can help you prevent your information from getting on the dark web in the first place.