Reports of Cyber related incidents Spiked at the start of 2019
Reporting?s of both major and minor cyber incidents across the UK, towards the end of 2018 and the start of 2019, reached a high of over 1,000% that of the previous year. This unusual spike in the amount of companies reporting incidents was in fact mainly due to the increase in hacking attempts on smaller, less protected businesses, instead of hackers traditionally targeting larger, well known businesses due to the amounts of data that they hold.
Furthermore, the majority of the reported incidents, 60% to be exact, originated from consumer banks, this is therefore a major concern for a consumer, due to the fact that banks typically store vast amounts of personal information which in the wrong hands could lead to stress from activities of potential fraud, such as identity theft.
Additionally, an independent insurer, known as Hiscox, found that around 55% of the reported incidents in the above article had faced an actual attack during the beginning of 2019, whereas during the same time period in 2018 the figures available show that only 38% of the reported incidents actually contained a legitimate threat/attack, this is therefore a substantial increase to the amount of attacks that have taken place.
Hiscox also stated that the increase in the amount of reported attacks did not correlate with the amount of companies who scored high when tested on general cyber security knowledge and preventative measures, which showed results that had fallen compared with previous years.
Finally, the overall budget that is assigned to cyber attack prevention within UK companies was one of the lowest of the several countries that were tested, this however was explained by the UK having a much larger amount of small to medium sized businesses, with over 5,400 small to medium businesses tested during the survey, and therefore less money is available to allocate to cyber-attack prevention.