A recent survey has revealed that 90% of Australian organisations have faced some sort of cybersecurity compromise during the 2015-16 financial year, highlighting the need for cyber insurance to avoid massive financial losses from a cyber attack.
The survey by the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) polled 113 organisations, 90% of which claimed to have experienced some form of attempted or successful cybersecurity compromise.
The inaugural Cybersecurity Survey found that the respondents experienced numerous malicious cyber threats on a daily basis, with spear phishing emails alone affecting organisations up to “hundreds of times a day,” ZDNet reported.
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The report aimed to understand how prepared Australian organisations are in the face of the growing cyber threat, the ACSC said, noting that experiencing a cyber incident is not a matter of if, but when and what type.
The survey found that 86% of respondents faced attempts to compromise the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of their network data or system, with 58% experiencing at least one incident that successfully compromised data and/or systems.
Of the compromises experienced, 42% were due to malware, 42% due to phishing, and 19% were caused by distributed denial-of-service (DdoS) attacks.
Attempted or successful compromises caused tangible impacts to 60% of the organisations.
“Given that only 2% of organisations reported having completely outsourced IT functions, these figures suggest organisations are not adequately focusing on monitoring networks and detecting potentially malicious activity,” the ACSC report said.
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