Study: Cybercrime Emerges as a Major Business Risk


Written by pkirvan on October 6, 2008 in Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery.

Finjan Inc. recently announced the findings of its Web security survey of 1387 IT/security professionals conducted during July 2008.  The results reveal that an overwhelming number of respondents perceive cybercrime as a major business risk, specifically the possibility of their sensitive information such as customer, patient, and employee data being stolen by crimeware.

Following its Q2 Trend Report findings about today’s cybercrime economy and its modus operandi, Finjan conducted an online survey to determine the current perception of Cybercrime and Web 2.0 risks to organizations.  Respondents were asked about business risks resulting from crimeware attacks, the potential damage that successful attacks might inflict, their knowledge of being breached, their main concern with respect to data theft and loss of productivity, and about security solutions and Web 2.0 policies.

Key findings from the survey:

  • 91 percent of all respondents stated that they perceive cybercrime as a major business risk (e.g., loss of customers, brand name damage, lawsuits, etc.)
  • 73 percent of all responding CIOs and CSOs were more concerned about data theft (crimeware stealing their business data) than about downtime and loss of productivity due to virus infections
  • The majority of the respondents (68 percent) indicated that their corporate intellectual property and sensitive information is at risk of data theft
  • More than half of the respondents (54 percent) worry about their corporate employee information being stolen
  • 47 percent of all respondents listed theft of their corporate customer information as a major business concern
  • 25 percent of the respondents reported that their data had been breached, with a further 42 percent of respondents stating that they could not exclude the possibility of a breach
  • 67 percent of respondents knowledgeable about web security listed real-time content inspection technology as the preferred web security solution

For details on the survey click here.

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