International. Data presented by the Atlas VPN team reveals that, globally, 78% of businesses experienced an increase in the volume of cyberattacks due to a shift towards remote work.
Even though social media platforms are flooded with news from companies proudly presenting the fact that they are permanently switching to a remote work environment, they usually don't mention the fact that the pivot has created major issues for their security.
Unpatched personal devices, erratic employee behavior, and inadequately protected home networks create many loopholes that threat actors can exploit.
Carbon Black, a company that provides workload protection services, surveyed 3,542 CIOs, CTOs and CISOs to find out if WFH (working from home) resulted in an increase in cyberattacks. Respondents came from various industries and 14 different countries. The survey was published in June 2021. Here we will analyze the increase in attacks country by country.
The study shows that a whopping 96% of companies in France experienced a significant increase in the number of attacks due to the shift to a WFH environment.
The second most affected country is Australia, where 89% of cybersecurity professionals reported that attacks increased due to employees working remotely. The UK and Japan share third and fourth place, with 86% of respondents claiming to have noticed a significant increase in cyber threats in the past year.
Up to 84% of companies in Saudi Arabia, 83% in the Netherlands, 82% in Singapore and 80% in the UAE said attacks increased substantially. Canada is in line with the global average, where 78% of companies reported growth in the volume of cyberattacks due to a shift to WFH.
Interestingly, the United States is on the lower side of the scale, with 63% of cybersecurity professionals reporting an increase in cyber threats in the past year.
In addition, 79% of respondents noticed that attacks had become more sophisticated. That is, hackers are willing to spend more time creating targeted attacks. These attacks aim to disarm the specific security measures that the target company has.
Perhaps even more shocking is the fact that companies that suffered a cyberattack reported having an average of 2.35 breaches per year. These were also not minor leaks. In 80% of breaches, the incident was material, meaning it was significant and reported to regulators or the incident response team (IR).
This data is in line with our previous reports, where we found that more than 5 billion personal records were leaked in the first quarter of 2021, and 37 billion data records were leaked in 2020, a growth of 140% year-over-year.
Source: Atlas VPN.
