According to a recent study, 90 percent of United States businesses have fallen victim to some sort of cyber security breach in the last 12 months. The study, conducted by Ponemon Institute for Juniper Networks, surveyed 583 businesses and revealed this staggering statistic in the midst of many recent cyber hacks.
Not only have 90% of businesses suffered at least one breach in the past 12 months, but 59% also claim that they have been hacked twice or more in the 12 month time period. Companies report that these breaches have cost at least half a million dollars to fix in terms of revenue loss, cash outlays, business disruption and other expenses. Again, 59% of respondents claimed that the worst consequences of the attacks were theft of information, followed by business disruption in second place.
Only 11% of the surveyed businesses claimed they knew the source of the breaches to their networks. 77% said the attacks are becoming more difficult to detect or contain, and 34% of companies stated they have a low confidence in their IT infrastructure to prevent future attacks. 43% responded saying there has been a significant increase in the amount of attacks in the past 12 months. Employee mobile devices and laptops are believed to be the most likely entry point through which serious attacks are unleashed.
Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of Ponemon Institute who carried out the investigation, said that “our survey research provides evidence that many organizations are ill-equipped to prevent cyber-attacks against networks and enterprise systems” and “conventional network security methods need to improve in order to curtail internal and external threats.” You can view the institute’s 25-page report on business cyber breaches here (PDF).