52% of Indian firms report cyber attack in last 12 months

The study of 900 business decision makers across Asia Pacific and Japan indicates Covid-19 accelerated period of digitisation and was a catalyst for improving cybersecurity, but systemic security issues persist.

Mumbai: About 52 per cent of Indian organisations said they fell victim to a successful cybersecurity attack in the last 12 months, according to a survey released on Tuesday.

Of these successful breaches, 71 per cent of organisations admitted it was a serious or very serious attack, and 65 per cent said it took longer than a week to remediate, showed the survey by global cybersecurity firm Sophos.

The study of 900 business decision makers across Asia Pacific and Japan indicates Covid-19 accelerated period of digitisation and was a catalyst for improving cybersecurity, but systemic security issues persist.

While attacks are increasing in frequency and severity, cybersecurity budgets remained largely unchanged as a percentage of revenue between 2019 and 2021.

At the same time, India reported the highest percentage of companies that have an independent security budget.

Furthermore, they expect a rise in the median percentage of technology budgets spent on cybersecurity from 9 per cent today to 10 per cent in the next 24 months.

“Cyberbreaches are a reality that we cannot afford to ignore. Within an organisation, there will always be multiple threats that can exploit various vulnerabilities and launch full blown cyberattacks,” Sunil Sharma, Managing Director — sales, Sophos India and Saarc, said in a statement.

“The only way to stop these threats is to actively hunt for them and neutralize them. This makes threat hunting an important function to mitigate the damage caused by cyberattacks.”

Overall, 44 per cent of Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) organisations surveyed suffered a data breach in 2020, up from 32 per cent in 2019.

Of these successful breaches, 55 per cent of companies rated the loss of data as either “very serious” or “serious”.

As cyberattacks continue to rise, the report found that malware, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning-driven attacks and nation state attacks will be the most serious threats to enterprise cybersecurity over the next 24 months.