About one-third of targeted attempts to breach corporations\u2019 cyber defenses succeed but three-quarters of executives remain unaccountably confident in their security strategies, Accenture Plc. reported Wednesday in a survey of 2,000 security officers representing large enterprises worldwide.<\/p>\n
The \u201calarmingly high\u201d failure rate in defending against attacks is compounded by their \u201csheer volume,\u201d Accenture said in the report, titled\u00a0Building Confidence: Facing the Cybersecurity Conundrum.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn average, an organization will face more than a hundred focused and targeted breach attempts every year, and respondents say one in three of these will result in a successful security breach,\u201d the report\u2019s authors write.\u00a0\u201cThat\u2019s two to three effective attacks per month.\u201d<\/p>\n
The survey follows recent high-profile data breaches of Sony Corp., Target Corp., the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, leaks from the e-mail accounts of Democratic Party officials, and a denial of service attack on the servers of Dyn Inc. in October that silenced Twitter Inc. and other major internet companies for several hours.<\/p>\n
Each year, businesses spend an estimated $84 billion to defend against data theft that costs them about $2 trillion — damage that could rise to $90 trillion a year by 2030 if current trends continue, according to a\u00a0forecast<\/a>\u00a0earlier this year by Omar Abbosh, Accenture\u2019s chief strategy officer.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Even though more than half of the survey\u2019s respondents say internal breaches cause the most damage, two-thirds say they lack confidence in their organization\u2019s ability to monitor internal threats and the majority continue to focus on defense against external attackers, the report says.<\/p>\nConfidence Lacking<\/h3>\n