Arkansas Online

Cyberattacks top business concern

Survey finds businesses see future attacks as inevitable

KENNETH R. GOSSELIN

Cyberattacks are now so common that the majority of businesses responding to a new survey not only viewed them as their top concern, but also saw a future attack on their organization as inevitable.

An annual survey of businesses by insurance giant Travelers Cos., which underwrites cybersecurity coverage, ranked cyberattacks as the top concern in an overall environment that was becoming more risky for doing business.

“Cyberattacks can shut down a company for a long period of time or even put it out of business, and it’s imperative that companies have a plan in place to mitigate any associated operational or financial disruptions,” Tim Francis, enterprise cyber lead at Travelers, said in a release.

Arthur House, former chief cybersecurity risk officer for the state of Connecticut, said Monday that the survey — including 1,200 small, medium and large companies across 15-plus industries — shows what many businesses are still reluctant to talk about publicly.

“There is still somewhat of a stigma to admitting that you have been hacked in a cyberattack,” said House, now an adjunct professor at the University of Connecticut who teaches cybersecurity. “As though you didn’t protect yourself adequately or there was something wrong with your IT systems.”

But he said the survey points to the reality that no company is safe from a cyberattack.

“It’s like an illness, everybody gets it,” House said. “There is not something necessarily wrong with you.”

The key, he said, is taking preventative measures as much as possible.

Those responding to the Travelers survey also said they saw bigger concerns compared with a year ago about economic uncertainty, rising energy costs and the ability to attract and retain employees.

The survey sampled opinion in mid- to late July and was conducted by Hart Research for Travelers.

Travelers began the survey in 2014, using it as the basis for its Travelers Risk Index. For the third time in the past four years, cybersecurity ranked as the top overall concern among businesses.

But unlike a year ago, when cyberattacks ranked 6 percentage points above the next biggest concern, other issues ranked closer this year to cybersecurity.

This year, 59% of survey respondents said they “worried some or a great deal about cyber threats.” That was followed closely with 57% being concerned about broad economic uncertainty; 56% being worried about fluctuations in oil and energy costs; 56% being concerned about the ability to attract and retain worker talent; and 56% being worried about inflation in medical costs.

Among the biggest jumps compared with a year ago was the cost of energy, up 16 percentage points from 40%.

Supply chain disruptions increased 11 percentage points to 54%.

A report earlier this month by insurer Hiscox found that cyber criminals, who have long targeted large companies, are moving down to small and midsize employers.

In its report, Hiscox Ltd. found that companies with annual revenues of $100,000 to $500,000 can now expect as many cyberattacks as companies earning $1 million to $9 million. Yet spending on cybersecurity has fallen with the smaller firms.

Gareth Wharton, Hiscox’s cyber chief executive, said the pandemic likely played a part in the trend.

“The move to remote working has prompted many smaller businesses to adopt cloud solutions in preference to building out their own remote services,” Wharton wrote in an introduction to the report. “That, in turn, has encouraged more cyber criminals to exploit vulnerabilities in cloud applications and target cloud service providers, too.”

Ransomware attacks increased, with 19% of survey respondents of the Hiscox survey reporting one in the past year, up from 16% a year earlier. Two-thirds of the firms paid their attackers, according to the Hiscox survey.

The Travelers survey found that 71% of companies surveyed had been the target more than once of a data breach or other “cyber event.”

“Multiple cyber attacks may not be random — if you are vulnerable before and don’t take appropriate action as a result, you continue to be a risk,” Travelers’ Francis said.

Business & Farm

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2022-09-28T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-09-28T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://edition.arkansasonline.com/article/282815015119757

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