Study shows diminished Cyber-Risk, but concerns remain as 78% of companies foresee successful Cyberattacks ahead
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Study shows diminished Cyber-Risk, but concerns remain as 78% of companies foresee successful Cyberattacks ahead

Cyber-Risk

Trend Micro announced that cyber-risk levels have been reduced from “elevated” to “moderate” for the first time, but that insiders continue to pose a persistent threat to global organizations.

“For the first time since we’ve been running these surveys, we saw the global cyber-risk index not only improve but move into positive territory at +0.01,” said Sharda Tickoo, Trend Micro’s Technical Director for India & SAARC. It could imply that organizations are taking steps to improve their cybersecurity preparedness. Employees continue to be a source of risk, so much work remains to be done. The first step in dealing with this is to gain complete and continuous visibility and control of the attack surface.”

The CRI discovered that over the last six months, cyber-preparedness improved in Europe and APAC while declining slightly in North and Latin America. At the same time, threats decreased in all regions except Europe.

However, the APAC (with a focus on India)/ASEAN region’s Cyber Preparedness Index in the second half of 2022 stood at 5.33 and in the first half of 2023 stood at 5.47, the highest in the world.

Most businesses remain pessimistic about their prospects for the coming year. According to the CRI, the majority of respondents said it was “somewhat to very likely” that they would experience a breach of customer data (70%) or IP (69%) or a successful cyber-attack (78%).

These figures represent 1%, 2%, and 7% decreases from the previous report, respectively.

The top four threats listed by respondents in the CRI 2H 2022 in the APAC region include

  • Business Email Compromise (BEC)
  • Ransomware
  • Clickjacking
  • Botnets
  • Crypto-mining

Employees were named as three of the top five infrastructure risks in the second half of 2022 by respondents in APAC (with a focus on India).

  1. Negligent insiders
  2. Cloud computing infrastructure and providers
  3. Shortage of qualified personnel
  4. Mobile/remote employees
  5. Organisational misalignment and complexity

“As the shift to hybrid working gains traction, organizations are rightly concerned about the risk posed by negligent employees and the infrastructure used to support remote workers,” said Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of Ponemon Institute. To help mitigate these risks, they will need to focus not only on technology solutions but also on people and processes.”