More IT professionals than ever think cyberattacks are getting worse, and most companies don't seem to be doing a good job protecting themselves.
A report from Thales surveying 3,000 IT and security professionals globally across numerous industries, found that 93% believe cyberattacks are becoming more severe or more frequent - a 47% rise on last year's findings.
The number of companies falling victim to ransomware also rose by over a quarter (27%) year on year, with less than half having a plan in place to deal with such events, and 8% relenting to paying their attackers' demands.
Data issues
In addition, Thales also found that 43% of enterprises failed a compliance audit last year, putting them at greater risk: 31% of those that failed suffered a cyberattack in the same year, and only 3% of those that passed did.
Malware is also rising rapidly according to the report, becoming the fastest growing threat this year so far, with 41% of enterprises have been infected by it. Phishing attacks follow closely behind. Such attacks mainly target cloud and SaaS applications, including cloud storage and infrastructure management.
More worryingly - and for a second time in a row - the report found that human error was the top cause for data breaches among enterprise, with 31% of firms believing this to be the reason.
Thales claims that the complexities of data management are only making enterprise cybersecurity worse. It found that only a third of organizations are able to classify their data, while many are still using multiple management systems to organize their data.
Sebastien Cano, Senior Vice President at Thales Cloud Protection and Licensing, commented, "enterprises need to know exactly what they’re trying to protect. With global data privacy regulations continually changing, they need to have good visibility across their organization to stand any chance of staying compliant."
He added, “if there’s one key takeaway from this year’s study, it’s that compliance is key."
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