Security flaws allow cyber crooks to go back for more

Companies which suffer hack attacks are failing to address the issue, resulting in half of all businesses worldwide experiencing repeat attacks from the same cyber crooks, with firms in the UK suffering the most.

According to data from Atlas VPN, the top five security threats affecting organisations are cloud vulnerabilities (65%), denial of service attacks (60%), phishing and social engineering attacks (52%), malicious insider threats (45%), as well as DNS-based attacks (44%).

Companies in the UK have had the most cybersecurity incidents (55%), followed by organisations in North America (50%), Europe (49%), and Latin America (48%).

What is more, out of the businesses that have experienced repeated attacks, three-fifths (61%) left themselves vulnerable to further attacks by failing to remediate the breaches.

As cyber attacks are growing more sophisticated, breaches have become everyday events rather than worst-case scenarios.

The number one challenge of survey respondents is that their systems generate too many low-value security alerts. When security analytics systems cannot effectively prioritise alerts, it wastes the team’s time by asking it to clear low-value alerts while highly important alerts linger at the bottom of the queue. Therefore, 69% of companies see it as a significant challenge.

Shortage of staff is another prevalent issue. In total, 60% of companies have a shortage of in-house expertise that could use security technologies, 56% say they lack the staff to pick up the workload, while 53% lack employees or skills to deliver lasting data-driven outcomes.

Atlas VPN cybersecurity researcher Ruth Cizynski said: “As long as organisations do not address existing vulnerabilities and security issues, they risk being hit by cybercriminals again. Organisations should prioritise internal processes that they can control over external security risks that they cannot.”