New Black Hat Asia Research: More than 70% of Security Professionals Predict a Major Data Breach Across Asian Countries in the Next Two Years

Cyber attacks levels have raised concerning the IT security professionals across the globe, and Asia is not an exception to it. A majority of the respondents in Black Hat Asia 2018 survey believe their organizations will have to respond to a major security incident in the next 12 months.

Most security professionals in Asia are convinced that a cyber attack can disrupt essential infrastructure across multiple countries within the region at intervals 2 years.

Many doubt their ability to defend against knowledge breaches and stand up to new threats. there’s the maximum amount concern concerning targeted attacks from highly sophisticated adversaries, as well as risks display by careless, negligent, and malicious insiders.

Critical Infrastructure Breaches

A majority of IT security leaders in Asia are convinced that a major, effective cyber attack
on critical infrastructure in their country, or multiple countries in the region is up and coming.

Targeted cyber attacks on specific organizations have turned into a developing issue for security experts all around.

In recent years, threat actors have refocused their exploits from the mass, opportunistic attacks of the past to attacks that are highly targeted and focused on specific objectives such as data theft or extortion via ransomware.

According to Black Hat Asia 2018 survey, more than 23% of the respondents believe that cyber espionage by large nation states represents the greatest threat to Asia’s critical infrastructure, followed by potential attacks by organized crime groups (21%).

Also Read How to protect your Organization From DDOS Attack

Security Professionals’ Greatest Concerns

IT and security managers in Asia are more concerned about sophisticated attacks targeted
specifically at their organizations than about any other threat and 56% of the respondent’s listed targeted attacks as their top challenge.

The majority of the respondents in the Blackhat Asia survey are concerned about the threat to enterprise data posed by malicious actors in Russia, China, and North Korea.

At end-of-year 2017 report from Flashpoint indicates that state-sponsored attackers from Russia and North Korea and, to a lesser extent, China ramped up their activities last year in response to various geopolitical factors.

Serious New Cybersecurity Threat – Black Hat Asia 2018

Beyond targeted attacks and phishing, our respondents had diverse views on their current
security concerns.

Twenty-six percent cited polymorphic malware as one of their biggest issues, while almost an equal proportion (24%) pointed to sabotage and data theft by malicious insiders.

Some of the top concerns listed by respondents were accidental data leaks (15%), Internet of Things (IoT) threats (15%), attacks on cloud services (14%), and espionage by a foreign government (10%).

Targeted attacks, as noted previously, remained the top-expected concern for 2020, suggesting that security professionals in the region see it as a long-term issue.

Sufficient Security Budget & Staff

Budget and skills shortage has been a perennial problem for cybersecurity managers everywhere. Gartner, for instance, expects worldwide enterprise security spending to top $96 billion in 2018, an increase of 8% from $89 billion in 2017 and 17% higher than the $82 billion spent in 2016.

The relative shortage of security staff among our Asian survey respondents is a manifestation of a much broader problem.Compared to other regions, the security staffing situation in Asia is actually better but only marginally so.