CERT-UK shines a light on internet safety in 2015/16

CERT-UK the excellent UK government sponsored cyber resilience entity  has released its overview of cyber risk in 2015.

It pulls together data from a range of sources and listed below are some key extracts;

1. The 2015 Information Security Breaches survey found that 74% of small businesses suffered a breach 38% of which was from an external attacker. So the disgruntled employee / freelancer is alive, kicking and armed with a USB stick. The average cost of breach was between £75,000 and £311,000.

2. The cyber insurance market is set for rapid expansion from £1.7 billion to £5 billion in 5 years. There is a caveat here that as the risk level is poorly understood there is some doubt in respect of whether cyber policies will prove effective until the market is more mature.

3. Top malware types (most common first were)

conficker
zeroaccess
ramnit
xcodeghost
sality
gameover zeus
neverquest
bamital
tinba
bedep

Conficker was the clear winner and represents a very serious threat for anyone still running XP or other unsupported software.

4. DDoS as a service is one to watch in 2016 potentially in combination with Ransomware.