Australian organisations are still taking too long to detect and contain IT security breaches, and the situation will get worse, according to Telstra.
“In some cases, organisations will never know whether an attack has happened, how long it happened for and how much it was, or still is, costing their business.
The quantity and severity of attacks and cost per attack will undoubtedly increase throughout the year,” a new Telstra report says.
The conclusion comes from the 2019 edition of Telstra’s fourth annual Security Report. More than 60 percent of respondents said their business had been interrupted as the result of a security breach in the past year.
Some 81 percent of Australian respondents had been victims of ransomware;
55 percent reported paying the ransom, but only 77 percent of these were able to recover their data, declared the lowest rate of any country surveyed.
Telstra said: “In spite of the lowest rate of data retrieval after paying ransom, 79 percent of Australian respondents indicated they would pay the ransom again next time, if there were no back-up files available.”
Its report also drew on the analysis of data from Telstra’s infrastructure and security solutions, and that of more than 15 third-party providers.
Findings included:
Some 89 percent of Australian businesses estimate security breaches went undetected – up 12 percent since 2018;
About 27 percent of Down Under organisations take weeks, months or years on average to detect a security incident or breach; and
An estimated 84 percent of Australian organisations spend up to 20 percent of their overall IT budget on security.
