Survey: More than 50% of German companies are victims of cyber attacks
A multi-country survey by the British insurer Hiscox on Tuesday shows that security authorities around the world are struggling in the fight against cybercrime.
According to the Hiscox comparison with selected countries, German businesses were relatively frequent targets of hackers.
The latest edition of the annual comparison of eight countries shows that 53 per cent of the companies surveyed reported cyber attacks.
The Cyber Readiness Report is based on a survey of 5005 executives, IT managers and professionals in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK, Ireland and the U.S.
According to Hiscox, cyber criminals were now increasingly attacking small and medium-sized businesses, in all eight countries, 36 per cent of the affected companies had less than ten employees, an increase by half compared to 2021.
However, out of the 963 German companies that responded more than half had reported cyber attacks in 2022.
During the study, it was discovered that 58 of German companies were attacked by hackers on one or more occasions, Hiscox’s Munich-based German subsidiary had announced.
That was 12 percentage points more than a year earlier. Only Ireland reported more hacker attacks than German companies experienced.
Hiscox estimated that the average financial loss of a successful cyber attack was at 16,000 U.S dollars, somewhat less than in previous years.
In Germany, the most common successful cyber attack is via a compromised business email. Also known as “fake president fraud,’’ hackers use stolen email addresses to impersonate executives and direct payments to their own accounts.
In Germany, 43 per cent of companies had suffered financial damage because payments were diverted to hacker accounts.
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