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Spending Increases Not Sufficient to Curb Breaches: Surveys

The strategic threat to businesses from lax cybersecurity is significant, and boosting spending hasn’t been enough to stop breaches. That’s the takeaway from sifting through a pair of recent surveys.

bad 157437 640SmallAccording to a survey by security vendor Security.org, 21.6% of Americans say they would stop doing business with a company that experienced a data breach. What’s more, 67.3% say they trust a company less after learning it has been breached. Unfortunately for businesses that do successfully thwart hackers, almost 30% of the survey respondents wrongly claimed knowledge of data breaches that didn’t actually occur. The survey is based on responses from more than 1,000 people in the United States, including almost 300 data breach victims.

Separately, Experian has released the results of a Ponemon Institute survey of 650 professionals in the United States and 456 in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Cybersecurity investment has seemingly increased, with 68% of respondents saying that their organization has dedicated more resources to technologies that help them detect and respond to a data breach. But data breaches are up, as well, with 63% saying they had a data breach involving more than 1,000 records, up 4% from 2018.

Spear phishing attacks appear to be an increasing concern, as 23% of respondents say they are confident in their ability to handle such attacks, down from 31% a few years ago. Plus, 69% of respondents had at least one spear phishing attack last year.

Ransomware remains a worry too. A ransomware attack took place at 36% of respondents’ organizations in 2019, and only 20% say they feel confident they can handle such attacks.

Then there are accidental breaches. Another new survey, from IT management software provider SolarWinds, focuses on the public sector. The top source of IT security threats identified by the 400 federal, state and local respondents, at 52%, was careless and untrained insiders.

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