Thursday 28 Mar 2024
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KUALA LUMPUR (Nov 30): Japanese multinational cybersecurity software company Trend Micro Inc said 72% of organisations in Malaysia have had customer records compromised multiple times over the past 12 months as they struggle to profile and defend an expanding attack surface.

The findings come from Trend Micro’s semi-annual Cyber Risk Index (CRI) report, compiled by the Ponemon Institute based on interviews with over 4,100 organisations across North America, Europe, Latin/South America, and Asia-Pacific.

The CRI released on Tuesday (Nov 29) calculated the gap between organisational preparedness and the likelihood of being attacked, with -10 representing the highest level of risk.

Trend Micro said the global CRI index moved from 0.04 in the second half of 2021 (2H2021) to 0.15 in 1H2022, indicating a surging level of risk over the past six months.

It said organisations in North America and Asia-Pacific saw an increase in their cyber risk from 2H2021.

The firm said this means that the respondents feel more risk associated with preparing for cyberattacks as well as a higher risk of current threats targeting them.

For Malaysia, the report revealed that:

  • 29% suffered more than seven breaches of customer data over the past year
  • 36% had more than seven data breaches of information assets
  • 90% claimed to have suffered one or more successful cyberattacks in the past 12 months
  • 80% of organisations in Malaysia think they will be successfully attacked in the next 12 months, with 22% claiming this is “very likely” to happen.

Trend Micro Malaysia and nascent countries managing director Goh Chee Hoh said with hybrid working ushering in a new era of complex, distributed information technology environments, many organisations are finding it difficult to eradicate growing security coverage and visibility gaps.

“To avoid the attack surface spiralling out of control, they need to combine asset discovery and monitoring with threat detection and response on a single platform,” he said.

Goh said Malaysia’s CRI index moved from 0.37 in 2H2021 to -0.04 in 1H2022.

He said this shows that the risk has increased from moderate to elevated.

Goh said this trend is also reflected elsewhere in the data, with 62% of respondents surveyed saying their organisation is not able to contain most cyberattacks, and only 44% is prepared to deal with data breaches and cybersecurity exploits.

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