14 DAY TRIAL // Security issues among British companies are extremely high, with 75% of firms admitting they have experienced a data breach in the last year.
The data comes from a research ordered by Cyren, a cloud-based security company, and indicates that when it comes to businesses with 1000 or fewer employees, the figure rises to 85%.
"There is a serious and growing cyber security problem for businesses of all sizes in the UK, considering that 75 percent report falling victim to a cyber attack or even multiple attacks during the past year," said Michael Osterman, Principal Analyst of Osterman Research, the company that conducted the research.
He added that it's important to recognize that being small doesn't mean you aren't at risk or won't be a target of a security breach. The best evidence for this is the fact that 85% of organizations with more than 100 but fewer than 1,000 employees reported a serious infection or breach.
The greatest concern was expressed about data breaches, but also ransomware and targeted attacks and zero-day exploits. Ransomware infections were reported at twice the rate in organizations with fewer than 1,000 employees when compared to organizations with 2,500 to 5,000 employees.
"The greatest security gaps, where IT managers' level of concern most outstrips their evaluation of their security capabilities, are in dealing with targeted/zero-day attacks, the threat of data breaches, botnet activity, and malicious activity from insiders," the report reads.
More concerned with fixing than preventing
The problem with the entire situation seems to stem, at least in part, from the fact that IT managers are far more concerned about the costs of infection than the costs of protection. They are also more concerned with stopping malware than controlling employee web behavior, except from banning them access to pornography.
The study shows that the largest organizations surveyed, with 2,500 to 5,000 employees, believe application control is the most important capability in evaluating new solutions, with 73% of them rating it as extremely important. Smaller organizations don't have such strong beliefs, however, as only 43% and 41% of the two smaller employee size categories give it as high a ranking.