Majority of organisations experienced a cyberattack in last year

Netwrix has released its annual global 2023 Hybrid Security Trends Report. It reveals that 68 percent of organisations experienced a known cyberattack within the last 12 months. Nearly one in six (16 percent) of those organisations estimated the financial damage to be at least $50,000. What’s more, 40 percent of the breached organisations incurred unplanned expenses and 10 percent suffered other serious consequences, such as loss of competitive edge, decreased sales or customer churn.

To mitigate the risk of financial loss from data breach, organisations often opt to purchase cyber insurance. Indeed, the study found that 44 percent of organisations are insured and 15 percent plan to purchase a policy within the next 12 months. Nearly one in four (22 percent) of the organisations with a policy had to improve their security posture to even be eligible for the policy.

“While cyber insurance has value, it’s vital to remember that it is no substitute for strong security. After all, while an insurance pay out can defray the financial impact of a security incident, no policy can restore an organisation’s data, operations, or reputation,” says Dirk Schrader, VP of security research at Netwrix.

The survey also reveals that on-premises infrastructures suffer more cyberattacks than the cloud. The starkest difference was for ransomware and other malware attacks, which were reported by nearly twice as many respondents for on-premises environments (37 percent) as for the cloud (19 percent).

“On-prem environments are more vulnerable to attacks than software-as-a-service (SaaS) systems because they often have sprawling privileges on the infrastructure level. For example, users might have administrative rights on their computers and service accounts often have elevated rights. Malicious actors can abuse these standing privileges to spread malware quickly across on-premises systems,” says Dmitry Sotnikov, VP of product management at Netwrix.

Other survey findings include:

81 percent of organisations now use at least one cloud environment and more than a third (37 percent) of the remainder plan to adopt cloud technologies within 12 months

Phishing is the most common attack vector: 73 percent of respondents suffered this type of cyberattack on premises and 58 percent experienced it in the cloud

Account compromise attacks in the cloud continue to intensify, with 39 percent of respondents reporting it in 2023 compared to 31 percent in 2022 and just 16 percent in 2020

Risk associated with an organisation’s own employees was the top data security concern, cited by 58 percent of respondents

The three main IT priorities for 2023 have remained the same since 2019: data security, network security, and cybersecurity training

“Understaffing of IT teams is the biggest challenge to ensuring data security, cited by half of respondents. Therefore, it is crucial to build a security architecture that reduces the workload for IT and security pros. Automating routine tasks, choosing mature security products that produce fewer false positive alerts, and relying on a select group of trusted vendors that have an extensive portfolio and a unified support team can help mitigate the shortage of security personnel,” says Dmitry Sotnikov.