Global Organizations Believe Cybersecurity Threats Will Increase in 2020

FireEye has just released its Cyber Trendscape Report, which predicts that cybersecurity threats will most likely increase this coming 2020.

What’s even more alarming is that 51 percent of the organizations surveyed by the cybersecurity firm believe that they’re not ready for potential cyber attacks or breach events.

FireEye wrote in its report:

“The majority (51%) of organizations do not believe they are ready or would respond well to a cyber attack or breach event. Moreover, nearly 29% of organizations with cyberattack and breach response plans in place have not tested or updated them in the last 12 or more months.”

FireEye surveyed more than 800 CISOs and senior executives from all over Europe, Asia, and North America to help companies and other organizations benchmark their cybersecurity initiatives.

Aside from breach readiness, below are the other key findings from FireEye’s survey.

Cybersecurity Threats and Other FireEye Key Findings

Increasing Budget

According to the Cyber Trendscape Report, about 76 percent of the organizations included in the survey are planning to increase their cybersecurity budget next year.

A large number of U.S. participants, 39 percent, indicated plans to increase their cybersecurity budget by 10 percent. But, a full 25 percent of organizations, which are from Japan and Korea, is planning to retain their 2019 security budget in 2020.

A small percentage of the surveyed organizations also expressed plans to slash their security budget by over 10 percent next year.

In general, the organizations included in the FireEye survey allocate their cybersecurity budgets for prevention (42%), detection (28%), containment (16%), and remediation (14%).

Value of Cyber Security Solutions

Over 57 percent of the participants in FireEye’s survey believe that the cost of cybersecurity is reasonable enough for the value it provides. However, around 25 percent think otherwise, saying it’s expensive.

A mere eight percent of organizations told FireEye that technology providers and cybersecurity vendors are doing a good job in eliminating all cybersecurity threats. However, the majority of the participants believe that governments and regulatory agencies are doing a good job (42%) or a very good job (11%).

Cybersecurity Threats Will Worsen

More than 90 percent of the survey participants agree that cybersecurity threats will remain the same or will worsen in 2020.

Among the industries the organizations believe would be targeted the most by cybercriminals are finance and banking (20%), technology (16%), and government (10%).

When asked to identify the components they think would be targeted the most, the organizations agree that it would be the servers, web servers, and server operating systems, together with medical devices and endpoints.

Sources of Attacks

According to FireEye’s report, 31 percent of organizations believe that hacker groups would be the likely source of attacks in 2020. It’s followed closely by individual hackers (18%) and criminal organizations (17%).

Other Findings

Aside from the key findings listed above, FireEye also noted in its report that cybersecurity training remains an issue among the surveyed organizations. In fact, around 21 percent of participants, which came from Germany, admitted that they lack the training needed to tackle cybersecurity threats.

Around 86 percent of the organizations in the survey revealed that they have already set up blockchain initiatives. On the other hand, 40 percent said that they already started efforts to understand AI and AI security better.

To know more about FireEye’s Cyber Trendscape Report, download it here.

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