As the volume of cyber threats continues to escalate, new research from Censornet has revealed that one in three mid-market organisations suffered from a hacker-inspired outage in 2021.
The survey reveals that more than one in five were forced to pay hackers to deactivate ransomware, with the average pay-out amounting to £144,000 and 7% handing over more than £500,000.
“For the UK mid-market, the cybersecurity situation is serious,” said Ed Macnair, CEO at Censornet. “The financial and reputational cost of cybercrime is rising, putting more pressure on overwhelmed professionals who are tackling hundreds of alerts a day from siloed point products.”
Collecting the insights of 200 IT and security leaders across the UK, covering 10 different industries in both the public and private sectors, the research also reveals that these vulnerabilities are worsening in severity as more workers work from home.
Over half (51%) of mid-market organisations involved in the survey said they hadn’t purchased cybersecurity products designed to protect against threats for hybrid and remote workers.
As a result, 76% of organisations said they plan to invest in a cloud-based security platform that allows their security products to autonomously share security event data to better protect their organisation.
