Businesses are experiencing a growing number of targeted attacks within that country.
A newly released government report in Australia has shown that there is a rapid rise in the number of data breaches among organizations in the country, which suggests that there may be a growing need for cyber insurance.
Over one fifth of companies that the government surveyed stated that they had been targeted last year.
There were 255 companies that participated in the government survey, and one in every five said that within the last year, they had been a target. Because of this, many have considered cyber insurance to help to protect themselves against the damage that can be caused by these attackers, and to equip themselves with the tools that they need to recover quickly.
Cyber insurance could help Australian businesses to minimize damage and speed up recovery.
Among those businesses that said that they had been targeted within the last year, 20 percent admitted that they had experienced over ten “cyber security incidents”. Out of the top 255 companies, one said that it had experienced the theft of a decade and a half worth of critical business data.
The national computer emergency response team (CERT) Australia commissioned the study, that was conducted by the University of Canberra. The result was the “2012 Cyber Crime and Security Survey Report”, which was just released, yesterday.
The report also indicated that among those companies that reported that they had not experienced any data breach incidents, it was likely that some simply did not detect that it occurred. Over half of the businesses that participated in the survey claimed that they felt that attacks were a targeted occurrence, as opposed to being indiscriminate. Among the respondents, 44 percent felt that these breaches came from within the company, though the majority felt that they came from external sources.
The attacks were primarily the result of malicious software which could cause denial of service attacks and that could allow for the theft of confidential information. This was the case regardless of the fact that 90 percent of the respondents said that they had spam filters, antivirus software, and firewalls. Moreover, 65 percent stated that they had IT security team members with tertiary qualifications. It is in these instances that businesses can often gain the most benefit and peace of mind from cyber insurance protection.