79 percent of businesses lack strategies to manage external cybercrimes

The findings reveal that the companies represented in this research averaged more than one cyber attack per month and incurred annual costs of approximately USD 3.5 million because of these attacks.

The report ‘Security Beyond the Traditional Perimeter,’ sponsored by internet risk detection and mitigation expert BrandProtect, examined the threats, costs and responses of companies to external internet cyber attacks. These threats include executive impersonations, social engineering exploits, and branded attacks arising outside a company’s traditional security perimeter.

External internet attacks are frequent and the financial costs of these attacks are significant. 59% of respondents say the protection of intellectual property from external threats is essential or very important to the sustainability of their companies.

79% of respondents described their security processes for internet and social media monitoring as non-existent (38%), ad hoc (23%) or inconsistently applied throughout the enterprise (18%).
64% of security leaders feel that they lack the tools and resources they need to monitor, 62% lack the tools and resources they need to analyze and understand, and 68% lack the tools and resources they need to mitigate external threats.

Security leaders agreed that monitoring the internet and social media is critical to gaining intelligence about external threats. Top monitoring priorities include mobile app monitoring (cited by 62% of respondents), social engineering and organizational reconnaissance (61% of respondents), branded exploits (59% of respondents) spear-phishing infrastructure (58%) of respondents), and executive and high value threats (54% of respondents).