Future likelihood of successful cyberattacks
Expectations about successful cyberattacks over the coming 12 months reached a new high in this year’s survey “Cyberthreat Defense Report“.
The number of respondents indicating that cyberattacks were either “somewhat likely” or “very likely” edged up from 756% to 761%.
In addition, the mix between those two views shifted for the worse The percentage saying a successful attack was “very likely” jumped by 3 1%, to 35 1%. That is four times the number (8 5%) who gave that response eight years ago when this survey started (see Figure 5) – picture above.
“The best we can say is that the rate of increase in the combined total has slowed to half a percentage point in this survey, after having jumped 2 9%, 4 1%, and 6 3% in the 2019, 2020, and 2021 CDRs, respectively.
“We think the curve has flattened because organizations have spent the last two years putting in place infrastructure and processes to protect remote operations, home-based workers, and personal devices (i e , devices not managed by the IT department),” says the report.
Examples of such measures include bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies and zero-trust network access (ZTNA) approaches to network and application access.
Those investments are giving security teams greater confidence in their ability to manage the challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Perhaps we should all follow the example of Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th century British prime minister, who said: ‘I am prepared for the worst, but hope for the best ’”
Defense against cyberattacks
It is interesting to note that the 76 1% of respondents indicating that a successful attack is somewhat or very likely in the coming 12 months is less than the 85 3% who experienced such an attack in the past year In other words, at least some security professionals who were victimized last year think their organizations are better able to defend themselves this year.
Or else they are just optimistic. A positive attitude is healthy, when not taken to extremes. Perhaps we should all follow the example of Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th-century British prime minister, who said: “I am prepared for the worst, but hope for the best.”
When looking at expectations by country, the highest number of respondents predicting successful cyberattacks were in Japan (87 9%), Canada (85 4%), and Singapore (84 0%).
In the middle of the pack: the United States (79 7%), Spain (76 0%), and Germany (74 3%) The optimists were Colombia (60 7%), Brazil (55 9%), and Turkey (a mere 38 0%) (see Figure 6).
By industry, respondents from finance are expecting the worst (86 7%), followed by those in education (84 1%), telecom and technology (79 1%), and healthcare (76 0%). Those in retail (70 4%) and manufacturing (68 9%) were more sanguine.
And as on the previous question, security professionals in the government sector (54 3%) were least worried (see Figure 7).