76% Indian businesses hit by cyber attacks: Survey

Chennai: IT security continues to be a major issue across the globe with 68 per cent of organisations surveyed hit by cyberattacks in the last year, 76.3 per cent organisations in India, said a new report based on the findings of a global survey.

On an average, organisations impacted by cyberattacks were struck at least twice, the report said and added IT managers are more likely to catch cybercriminals on their organisation’s servers and networks than anywhere else.

Released by network and endpoint security leader, Sophos, the report titled ‘7 Uncomfortable Truths of Endpoint Security’ stated that IT managers discovered 39 per cent of their most significant cyberattacks on their organisation’s servers and 34.5 per cent on its networks.

Only 7.9 per cent were discovered on endpoints and 18.8 per cent, which is almost double the global average, were found on mobile devices, it said.

“IT security continues to be a major issue across the globe with 68 per cent of organisations surveyed hit by cyberattacks in the last year (76.3 per cent organisations in India). On an average, organisations impacted by cyberattacks were struck at least twice,” the report said.

Fourteen per cent of IT managers who were victim to one or more cyberattacks last year can’t pinpoint how the attackers gained entry, and 17 per cent don’t know how long the threat was in the environment before it was detected, according to the survey.

To improve this lack of visibility, IT managers need endpoint detection and response (EDR) technology that exposes threat starting points and the digital footprints of attackers moving laterally through a network, it said.

On average, Indian organisations that investigate one or more potential security incidents each month spend 48 days a year (four days a month) investigating them, the survey stated.

It comes as no surprise that IT managers ranked identification of suspicious events (22 per cent), alert management (19 per cent) and prioritisation of suspicious events (13 per cent) as the top three features they need from EDR solutions to reduce the time taken to identify and respond to security alerts, the survey said.

“Server security stakes are at an all-time high with servers being used to store financial, employee, proprietary, and other sensitive data. Today, IT managers need to focus on protecting business-critical servers to stop cybercriminals from getting on to the network. They can’t ignore endpoints because most cyberattacks start there, yet a higher than expected amount of IT managers still can’t identify how threats are getting into the system and when,” said managing director, sales, Sophos India and SAARC, Sunil Sharma.