A robust 67% of respondents worldwide believe risks to their organisation’s business operations presented by cyber attacksare second only to those created by the economic climate. Respondents in Europe rank cyber attack risks solidly in first place, while it is tied for first with economic climate by North American respondents, with Australasian respondents ranking the risk second behind COVID-19 and lockdown measures.
With the daily barrage of media reports on high-profile cyber events, it is unsurprising the three categories of cyber risk put to respondents account for the top three risks: with the first being cyberattacks, second, data loss and third, cyber extortion.
With this backdrop, global regulators continue to urge directors to step up and ensure cyberrisk is well examined and addressed by their businesses, from safeguarding data ‘crown jewels’, to implementing good cyber hygiene and ensuring management are primed and ready to respond to and recover from a cyber attack.
2021 was a wakeup call for businesses operating in core critical infrastructure sectors in particular, as governments, including China, Australia and the U.S., joined the E.U. in implementing regulatory regimes to protect core critical infrastructure assets from cyber attacks. Existing regulatory regimes are also being enforced with more regularity that are often times accompanied by statutory fines and penalties for non-compliance.
Whilst the perception of this risk differs from region to region, this year’s results clearly point towards an intensifying concern of cyber attacks and data risk across the globe. Off the back of the Colonial Pipeline, JBS and Microsoft Exchange attacks, North American respondents reported a significantshift in concern about the risks of cyber incidents for directors: 64% of respondents in 2022 perceived the risk of cyber attacks as ‘very significant’ or ‘extremely significant’, as opposed to 52% in 2021.
64% of respondents in 2022 perceived the risk of cyber attacks as ‘very significant’ or ‘extremely significant’
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| Title | File Type | File Size |
|---|---|---|
| D&O Survey Cyber attack, data loss, cyber extortion | .8 MB |
