About 52% of Indian companies have fallen they fell victim to a successful cyber attack in the last 12 months, according to a report by Sophos, a British IT security company. The Sophos survey sought responses form senior IT managers from across 900 companies yn Australia, India, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore
The report says that migration to work from home owing to COVID-19 posed additional challenges to companies’ cybersecurity capabilities. But the pandemic also acted as a catalyst for upgrading cybersecurity capabilities for 69% of surveyed companies, as per the report titled The Future of Cybersecurity in Asia Pacific and Japan published by Sophos in collaboration with Tech Research Asia.
Among the 52% of affected Indian companies, over 70% of them said that the attack fell in the serious or very serious category and about 65% of them said that it took longer than a week to mitigate the attack. This is despite two-thirds of the surveyed companies globally stating that they have proactive capability against cyber attacks, the largest percentage of any country in Sophos’ research.
India’s statistic is somewhat better compared to the overall statistic. Nearly 70% of companies in Asia Pacific suffered a data breach in 2020, the report revealed.
The report further revealed that some of the companies, nearly 27%, will partner with external security companies to increase their capabilities over the next 12 months. The percentage of the technology budget spent on cybersecurity is expected to only increase marginally from 9% to 10% over the next two years, the report added. This follows the trend Sophos observed across Asia: cybersecurity budgets remain stagnant as executives continue to underestimate the threats.
According to the surveyed companies, artificial intelligence, machine learning, IoT devices, blockchain, and Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) convergence are technologies that will have the most impact on security over the next 24 months. The number of companies with a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) will also increase from 33% to 40% over this period, the report said.
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