UK Bosses - Heads In The Sand Over Cybercrime

UK businesses now have the dubious honour of leading the world when it comes to being victims of cyber-crime, although most are still in denial, with almost half believing a hack attack would have no impact on their reputation - despite the recent experiences of TalkTalk.

This blinkered approach has been revealed in PwC’s latest Global Economic Crime Survey, which found cybercrime has seen the fastest growth rate of any type of economic crime, nearly half (44%) of British businesses that had suffered economic crime over the last two years were affected by cyber incidents, a 20% increase from 2014.

This puts the UK way ahead of the global average - 32% - as businesses migrate to cloud-based storage and increasingly adopt connected Internet of Things devices in the workplace, with the huge rise in the number of devices connected to the office network increasing the risk of attack.

Overall, just over half (51%) of UK organisations said they expected to fall victim of cyber-crime in the next two years. Even so, this growing threat is still not causing all businesses to up their protection, however; PwC found almost a third of UK businesses have no cyber response plan in place.

“Hackers are now more ambitious than ever,” said Mark Anderson, PwC’s global corporate intelligence leader. “Their aim goes beyond targeting financial information to include a company’s ‘crown jewels’ – customer data and intellectual property information, the loss of which, can bring down an entire business.

“The threat of cybercrime is now a board level risk issue, but not enough UK companies treat it that way.”

In fact, UK respondents said that the greatest concern about a cyber-attack is the potential disruption to services, as nearly a third (31%) believed such an attack would have a medium-to high impact on their business.

“It’s clear that businesses are still struggling to deal with the volume and type of threats they face,” said Rob Lay, customer solutions architect in UK & Ireland at Fujitsu. “Companies should focus some effort on ensuring that they have suitable response processes in place, along with better visibility of what is going on within their environments.”
DataIQ: http://bit.ly/1QJER7h