UK businesses face more than 500 cyber attacks every second
British cybersecurity experts see 46m signals of cyber attacks every day, new data released by BT Business has shown.
Cybersecurity experts currently log at least 530 alerts to potential attacks per second, as they guard their global networks against an army of malicious actors seeking to exploit vulnerabilities of businesses and critical national infrastructure.
The BT data shows that every 30 seconds cyber criminals scan devices connected to the internet looking for weaknesses, using automation and machine learning to identify vulnerabilities in business defences – the digital equivalent of a burglar looking for an open window.
With businesses of every size going digital, the most targeted industries in the past 12 months were IT, defence, banking and insurance, accounting for almost 20 per cent of malware sightings in the past year.
The retail, hospitality and education sectors are also at high risk, accounting for 14.9 per cent of the malware sightings.
All of this means that the average business will have its network scanned and tested by cyber criminals more than 3,000 times each day.
These figures become particularly concerning when 61 per cent of businesses in the UK say that keeping up with cyber security measures is becoming increasingly difficult.
This is intensified by the challenge of keeping the whole organisation aware of the threats, with one in four businesses saying that this is their biggest pain point.
Tris Morgan, Managing Director of Security at BT, said: “The volume of cyberthreats in the UK is rising at an alarming rate, so it’s really concerning that so many businesses and public services are leaving themselves open to attack.
“The fabric of the modern business has changed, and there’s now more connected tech for hackers to exploit, more valuable data to target and a bigger prize at stake if they make it through.”