Almost a third of businesses in Ireland have money put aside to pay for ransoms arising from ransomware attacks, a new survey has found.
Half of the firms surveyed admitted their defences had been breached by a ransomware attack in the last year.
While more than half said they had fallen victim to social engineering cyberattacks in the last year.
One in every three respondents said they had actually paid a ransom to cybercriminals over the last 12 months.
A third of the businesses said they had been severely impacted by an incident within their organisation in the same time period.
31% have been severely impacted by a cybersecurity incident in their supply chain.
The results were gathered by Censuswide on behalf of the global engineering, technology and consulting firm, Expleo.
202 business IT leaders in companies with at least 50 companies were polled.
“Given the high success rates of known cyber-attack attempts, our research shows that if businesses have avoided falling victim to one type of attack, they have probably not been so fortunate with another,” said Rob McConnell, Global Solutions Director, Expleo Group.
“We have reached the point where it is not if you will be targeted, but when and how often.”
“Every single business should expect to be targeted by sophisticated attacks on an ongoing basis. It is only with this level of pragmatism that they will be able to deploy the defences needed to combat or detect these advances.”
The research also found that 29% of respondents anticipate that there will be a successful cyberattack against their organisation over the next year.
On average medium-to large-sized enterprise will invest €1.18m in cybersecurity in the next 12 months, the research found.
However, around one in five said they think their security technology is out of date, with a quarter admitting that they don’t invest enough in cybersecurity.
“At the most basic level, enterprises must be confident that they are investing enough in cybersecurity and that their systems and processes are constantly being updated and reinforced,” Mr McConnell said.
“But that will only go so far in protecting them. Organisations must adopt zero-trust frameworks which mean even the CEO is not trusted by the network.”
Article Source – Third of firms put money aside to pay cyber ransoms – RTE
