Organisations remain unprepared and without a formal plan to respond to cyber security incidents, according to this annual report announced by NTT Com Security, an NTT Group company. 

Analysing global threat trends since 2013, the 2016 report reveals that there has been little improvement in preparedness, with the latest figures indicating a slight increase in organisations that are not properly prepared, despite the rise in security attacks and data breaches.

Pulling information from 24 security operations centres, seven R&D centres, 3.5 trillion logs and 6.2 billion attacks in 2015, the GTIR shows that over the last three years, on average 77% of organisations fall into the ‘unprepared’ category, leaving just 23% with the capability to respond effectively to critical security incidents.

“Prevention and planning for cyber security incidents seems to be stagnating, according to the figures in both the GTIR and our recent Risk: Value report,” says Garry Sidaway, VP Security Strategy & Alliances, NTT Com Security. “This is a real concern and could be down to a number of reason, not least the possibility of security fatigue – too many high profile security breaches, information overload and conflicting advice – combined with the sheer pace of technology change, lack of investment and increased regulation.

Although financial services was the leading sector for incident response in previous annual GTIR reports, the retail sector now takes the lead, with 22% of all response engagements, up from 12% the previous year. Retail – a popular target due to processing large volumes of personal information such as credit card details – experienced the highest number of attacks per client.

Other incident response statistics from the 2016 GTIR:

• The report shows an increase in breach investigations, with 28% in 2015 compared to 16% the previous year, with many incidents focused on theft of data and intellectual property.

• Internal threats jumped to 19% of overall investigations – from 2% in 2014. Many of these were the result of employees and contractors abusing information and computing assets.

• Spear phishing attacks accounted for approximately 17% of incident response activities in 2015, up from 2% previously. Many of these attacks related to financial fraud targeting executives and finance personnel, with attackers using clever social engineering tactics, such as getting organisations to pay fake invoices.

• Despite a rise in DDoS hacking groups like DD4BC and Armada Collective, the GTIR noted a drop in DDoS related activity compared to the previous two years. This is likely to be due to an investment in DDoS mitigation tools and services.