These types of attacks are a growing challenge and, over the last decade, cyber security has become an increasingly important problem whether that’s compromising an organisation’s key functions and processes or exposing sensitive data to opportunistic criminals.
Specops Software has analysed data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to discover which countries across the world have experienced the most “significant” cyber-attacks between May 2006 and June 2020.
The United States of America came top, with a total of 156 attacks between May 2006 and June 2020. One of the USA’s most recent breaches, in May 2020, was brought to light by the National Security Agency (NSA), who found that Russian hackers were exploiting a bug in a commonly used email server to infiltrate sensitive data from American organisations
Following the USA is the United Kingdom, which saw 47 cyber-attacks classified as “significant”, India came third and Germany fourth.
The techniques most commonly used include, according to Specops: Denial of Service Attacks (DoS); SQL Injection Attacks; man-in-the-middle (MitM) and Phishing Attacks.
The economic consequences of these attacks are massive and underline the urgent need to address and prepare for them and, demonstrating the size of that challenge, research from Cybersecurity Ventures suggests that cyber-attacks could cost the global economy over $6 trillion per year by 2021.
