Cisco’s latest Annual Security Report has revealed that just 45% of businesses have confidence in their ability to verify and defend against a cyber-attack. Launched on 19 January 2016, the report brings to light the vulnerability of today’s businesses across sectors such as healthcare, financial services and government and provides significant insight into the current state of play regarding the ever-growing threat of cyber-criminality.
Factors such as aging infrastructure and outdated organizational structure and practices not only put businesses at greater risk of falling victim to cyber-crime, but they also have a damaging effect on their ability to quickly detect, mitigate and recover from professional attacks. Between 2014 and 2015, there was a 10% decrease in the number of organizations who felt they were operating with up-to-date security infrastructures and the survey found 92% of analysed internet devices are no longer supported or maintained by the vendor.
The struggles that businesses are facing do not come as a great surprise, with 85% of organizations being forced to cope with malicious browser extensions, along with the ever-increasing resilience of today’s hackers who are continually finding new ways of breaching legitimate resources including JavaScript and Facebook, with the number of WordPress domains used by criminals increasing by 221% between February and October 2015.
John N. Stewart, senior vice-president, chief security and trust officer, Cisco said:
“Security is resiliency by design, privacy in mind, and trust transparently seen. With IoT and digitization taking hold in every business, technology capability must be built, bought, and operated with each of these elements in mind. We cannot create more technical debt. Instead, we must meet the challenge head on today.”
Despite the uncertainty executives have regarding security strength, there is a clear understanding that regulators and investors will expect companies to manage cybersecurity risk exposure themselves, especially as organizations continue to digitize their operations.
Cisco’s report represents a global call-to-arms for greater collaboration across business sectors and investment into the process of implementing and maintaining efficient cyber-threat security.