Cybersecurity News: Number of Cyberattacks Remains High
UK government figures show that businesses are still subject to frequent online attacks, with the resulting breaches costing an average of £4,200
Despite the impact of the pandemic starting to lessen, the initial spike in cyberattacks following the 2020 lockdown remains an issue for organisations across the UK. This is highlighed in the latest figures published by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport.
The Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2022 from the DCMS examines various aspects of cyber security for a range of organisations, including businesses, educational institutions and charities. In all, just over 2,000 organisations were polled between 16th October 2021 and 21 January 2022.
The results show that 39% of businesses reported being the target of a cyberattack within the last 12 months. This figure remains high, and is exactly the same proportion of victims as in last years' survey. However, it is slightly down from 2020 when 46% of businesses detected an unknown intrusion. We have already discussed this increase of cyberattacks in June 2020 – May 2021.
Phishing attempts were the most common type of attack reported, at 83%. About 20% detected more advanced intrusions however, such as denial of service (DoS), ransomware or malware attacks.
The frequency of unauthorised access attempts is also another alarming factor, with 31% of businesses approached being targeted at least once a week. A fifth of businesses report a ‘negative outcome’ as a direct result of a cyberattack. Where this negative outcome has a material effect, such as a loss of data, it’s estimated that the average cost to a business is £4,200. This amount rises to £19,400 for just medium or large businesses.
To try and arm organisations with the knowledge to protect themselves from online attacks, the NCSC (National Cyber Security Centre) has published a helpful document entitled 10 Steps to Cyber Security. In the ‘Architecture and configuration’ section of the document, the NCSC states:
Choose products and services that are designed to be secure by default. This reduces the effort required to deploy products in a secure manner, and gives greater confidence that they will remain secure over time.
When it comes to choosing a method to synchronise time across your network, an NTP Time Server is an easy and efficient way to increase your cybersecurity. NTP Time Servers are inherently designed to be a secure solution, functioning within your firewall and including options for encryption, authentication and access protocols. They offer many benefits over a public time server, and since they synchronise time without requiring an internet connection, they eliminate the risk of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.
In addition to requiring an open port in your firewall, public time servers are often operated by public organisations such as universities, which are themselves a popular target of online intrusions. So this open port is allowing access from a potentially compromised source. Public time servers cannot compete with NTP Time Servers, which also offer increased accuracy and reliability in addition to security.
If you would like to find out more about our Netsilon NTP Time Server and how it can increase network security for your organisation, please contact us.
