Speaking to InvestorDaily about the company’s recent Cyber Defence Monitor report, BAE Systems Applied Intelligence head of cyber for the JAPAC region Alex Taverner said the volume of cyber attacks appears to be increasing.
“We do see that the number of attacks against organisations is increasing, and that’s through empirical data that we see from security operations centres, the volume of attacks coming through, and there are a number of different factors, it’s not just one group that’s behind that, there’s a number of different threat actor groups, some are nation states, some are hacktivists, some are cyber criminals, some are bored 14 year-olds,” he said.
“Cyber criminals are almost exclusively trying to monetise any attacks, and as people share more data with organisations and they have greater footprints in cyber space, then the risk of things like fraud and identity theft and those other types of crimes also increase.”
Mr Taverner said the impacts of a successful breach of a company’s cyber security measures was likely to have a profound impact on their business, noting the losses incurred by Yahoo after several million accounts were hacked in 2016.
“A successful attack can seriously impact the finances and the trust in an organisation, and in some cases even the future of that organisation,” he said.
The Cyber Defence Monitor report also found that Australian C-suite executives are “far more wary” of being hacked than their global peers.
“Seventy-three per cent of those surveyed think they are likely to be the target of a cyber attack, as do 77 per cent of IT decision makers, compared to 57 per cent of those globally,” the report said.
“Australian executives, aware of a series of high profile hacks, may feel a serious attack on their organisation is only a matter of time.”
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