Constant cyber attacks the norm for many firms, says report

Some companies are experiencing a wave of cyber attacks, according to a new study.

It was found that, at present, 19 per cent of firms are constantly under attack – up from  four per cent last year. Rather than consisting of lone or one-off attacks, in many cases the activity is believed to form part of an intentional, targeted game plan.

Over half of firms (52 per cent) said in the study that they don’t possess in-house knowledge to handle the attacks for any duration longer than one day.

The Global Application and Network Security Report for 2014-15, which compiled the data, was launched by Ring of Fire.

The study found that the attacks have proven to be dynamic. Ring of Fire’s UK and Ireland regional director, Adrian Crawley, named a retailer that blocked any traffic sourced from Russia when the firm was being attacked, but the hackers quickly changed location, with cyber assaults then being made from China.

Hosting firms and ISPs are among the primary targets. Crawley explained:

“Although ISPs are set up to handle volume attacks, these attacks do cause degradation in the network and create a distraction so that lower volume specific application level attacks occur at the same time. And the attackers use tools to automatically change the type of attack as the attack goes on.”

Today’s businesses, whether they like it or not, will need to place a greater emphasis on cyber security. If they don’t increase their IT security recruitment efforts, they may find themselves taking on one attack too many, causing potentially irreparable damage to their systems and data.