System compromises are now the greatest cyber concern for IT security leaders, with nearly one in four (23%) security leaders citing them as the biggest threat to their business - according to new research from the Neustar International Security Council (NISC). The exploitation of such vulnerabilities was selected ahead of ransomware (19%) and financial data theft (19%) as the greatest cyber risk to businesses across Europe, with DDoS (17%) and intellectual property (IP) threats (13%) also prevalent.
This new data has been revealed as part of a bi-monthly research series from the NISC, which has polled 252 IT security CTOs, VPs, senior directors, business managers and other professionals across Europe with a security remit.
The NISC research findings have also been used to calculate a unique Cyber Benchmarks Index, which measures the level of concern in the NISC community of security professionals about the current international cybersecurity landscape. The index figure is up to 9.4, a considerable increase from the 6.5 rating in May 2017.
Almost three-quarters (73%) of respondents acknowledged that specific recent cyber-attacks have directly affected the way they protect their enterprise, an eight per cent increase in just two months. Leaders have cited moves such as changing their “entire security infrastructure”, the renewal and expansion of their security teams and also employing external specialists to tackle this issue.
Nearly half (45%) of respondents called out targeted hackings as a growing threat to their business, followed closely by general phishing (43%) and ransomware (43%), with organisations repositioning their efforts to protect against such dangers.
Rodney Joffe, Head of NISC and Neustar Senior Vice President and Fellow, commented on the findings. “Hackers have never been more prepared, more sophisticated or more determined to breach organisations through targeted attacks – with our threat index on the rise and businesses putting measures in place to defend against this risk,” he said. “However, we have only recently seen the impact of another potentially devastating ransomware attack, BadRabbit, which has infected hundreds of organisations across Russia and Eastern Europe,” Joffe added. “We expect the response to this new attack to show up in the next NISC survey due in December, which will perhaps affect the survey results. With a growing number of firms reporting data breaches following ransomware, DDoS and web application attacks, business leaders must act to ensure their web perimeters are robustly secure from this evolving cyber landscape.”
