14 DAY TRIAL // In a survey of over 100 news media agencies, 52% of respondents said they have been the target of some form of cyber-attack since the start of 2014, as Peter Marsh, VP Marketing, Newscycle Solutions is reporting.
The study, carried out during the month of October 2015, comes to shed some light on the media publishing business, which hasn't gone under the radar when it came to cyber-attacks but has been actually one of its main targets.
According to gathered data, while 52% of all news media companies reported cyber-attacks, 12% could not tell if one has happened, while 37% said they had not recorded any attacks in the last 2 years.
In the case of the companies that were attacked, 59% reported phishing attempts, 51% reported malware infections, while 49% said they have been DDoSed. Other attack types were also recorded, but not as common as the three aforementioned. These included exploitation of SQL injection vulnerabilities, ransomware, and defacement of mobile and social media accounts.
News companies are becoming aware of the rising threat of cyber-attacks
Faced with this rising trend of attacks, most respondents said they fear most losing personally identifiable information (PII) (73%), followed by financial or banking information (70%), subscriber and customer data (62%), advertising data (39%), sensitive company details (34%), and news and editorial content (32%).
This has led to an increase of security-focused measures in the past six months, and the respondents, which are senior technology managers, CTOs, CIOs, and IT directors working in big news and media agencies said their companies started putting more resources into cyber-security (65%).
Asked what drove them to such decisions, they responded that: they've become aware that media agencies started to become a target for such cyber-attacks in the industry (56%), the business environment has changed with the proliferation of more online tools (53%), the potential loss of reputation is quite important (45%), regulatory and compliance requirements forced them to do so (41%), external threats have increased in the past 2 years (35%), and the high financial costs associated with each cyber-attack and data breach are not to be ignored (31%).
Interesting is the fact that of all surveyed companies, 59% foresee an attack in 2016, 45% are saying they've implemented an active data security awareness program, 39% admit they don't have such a program right now, and 48% also say they don't have a security specialist at hand.
