Cyber Attacks Hit 75% of Enterprises in 2009

If there’s still any doubt about it, security vendor Symantec’s latest data makes it perfectly clear: Hackers have enterprises firmly in their cross-hairs.

The company’s new State of Enterprise Security gives new, alarming indications that not only are malicious hackers, identity thieves, and malware authors eying high-value targets, enterprise IT security administrators’ efforts to fight back are being hamstrung by budgets and staffing.

Not surprisingly, enterprises are finding it tough to cope, and Symantec puts a very hefty price tag on the cost of all of those breaches. eSecurity Planet has the story.

Enterprises are well aware of growing security threats to their organizations, but so far have lacked the resources and staff to deal with increasingly sophisticated and malicious cyber attacks, according to Symantec’s latest “State of Enterprise Security” study.

The telephone survey conducted in January contacted 2,100 businesses and government agencies in 27 countries and found that 100 percent of them had experienced cyber losses of some type in the past year. Seventy-five percent of organizations said they were hit by a cyber attack in the past year and 36 percent of those rate the attacks as either “somewhat” or “highly effective.”

The top three reported losses were theft of intellectual property, theft of customer credit card information or other financial information that resulted in monetary loss in 92 percent of instances. The top three costs, according to the survey conducted for Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) by Applied Research, were productivity, revenue, and loss of customer trust.

Read the full story at eSecurity Planet:


Most Enterprises Worldwide Hit by Cyber Attack in 2009