Even before the Corona crisis, IT security was not in good shape in many companies. Home office and pandemic-related losses make the problem even worse.
The corona crisis often has a negative impact on the IT security of companies. This is the result of a research report by the Criminological Research Institute Lower Saxony (KFN).
Working in the home office and using private hardware and software therefore increase the risk of infection with malware and phishing attacks. These are e-mails from supposedly reputable senders with which fraudsters want to obtain passwords, for example. Above all, companies with a tense economic situation that rarely take additional IT security measures are at risk.
The authors of the report surveyed a total of 5,000 companies with more than ten employees in 2018/19. More than 600 companies took part in a follow-up survey between July and September 2020. 60 percent of them reported that they had to respond to at least one cyber attack within a year. Automatically repelled attacks, for example by a firewall, are not included. In 85 percent of the cases, the cyber criminals were able to be fended off at an early stage of the experiment.
According to the KFN, so-called dark field data on the subject of cyber attacks against companies were collected for the first time over a longer period of time in the “Cyber security in companies” project. Because the reporting rate of such crimes is low: In the first round it was 12 and now 9 percent. The most common reasons given for this were the low level of damage, followed by the lack of prospect of success in the investigation.
The partner in the “Cyber attacks against companies” project funded by the Federal Ministry of Economics was the Leibniz University of Hanover.
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