78% of Organizations Predict Increased Risks of Cyber Attacks, According to Trend Micro's CRI

Trend Micro Incorporated, a global provider of cybersecurity, recently announced an improvement in cyber risk levels, moving from 'elevated' to 'moderate' for the first time. However, the company emphasized that insiders continue to pose a significant threat to global organizations.

The Cyber Risk Index (CRI) 2H 2022 report, which presents these findings, is based on interviews with 3,729 global organizations. The index uses a numerical scale from -10 to 10, with -10 representing the highest level of risk. It is calculated by subtracting the score for cyber threats from the score for cyber preparedness.

'For the first time since we've been running these surveys, we saw the global cyber-risk index not only improve but move into positive territory at +0.01,' said Jon Clay, Vice President of Threat Intelligence at Trend Micro (News - Alert). 'It means that organizations may be taking steps to improve their cyber-preparedness. There is still much to be done, as employees remain a source of risk.'

Notably, the report found that cyber-preparedness improved in Europe and the Asia-Pacific, but slightly declined in North and Latin America in the past six months. Threats declined in every region except Europe.

Despite general improvement, most organizations still remain pessimistic about their prospects over the coming year. The majority of respondents said it was 'somewhat to very likely' they'd suffer a breach of customer data (70%), intellectual property (69%), or experience a successful cyber-attack (78%). These figures represent declines of just 1%, 2%, and 7%, respectively, from the previous report.

The top four threats listed by respondents remained the same:

• Clickjacking
• Business Email Compromise (BEC)
• Ransomware
• Fileless attacks

Interestingly, 'botnets' replaced 'login attacks' in fifth place. Employees were also named as representing three of the top five infrastructure risks:

• Negligent insiders
• Cloud computing infrastructure and providers
• Mobile/remote employees
• Shortage of qualified personnel
• Virtual computing environments (e.g. servers, endpoints)

Dr. Larry Ponemon, a chairman and the founder of the Ponemon Institute (News - Alert), stressed the importance of considering not just technology solutions, but also people and processes to mitigate these risks, especially as the shift to hybrid working accelerates.

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