64% of the Critical Communication Industry Not Having Enough Cybersecurity Measures in Place

IWCE surveyed over 597 professionals working within the sector to benchmark the current technologies being used and technological challenges within the industry.

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IWCE surveyed over 597 professionals working within the sector to benchmark the current technologies being used and technological challenges within the industry. It discovered one out of five of the critical communications industry have had a cyber security incident within the past year. Only 36% regularly test their cybersecurity systems with 4.5% saying they have a full time ethical hacker on staff but one out of five claiming they don’t have any cyber security systems in place at all.

Types of attack

  • 61% experiencing Malware attacks  
  • 56.% experiencing Phishing. 
  • 27% Ransomware 
  • 22% Data Breach 
  • 16% have had a distributed denial of service 
  • 10% reporting they have Advanced threats (an unauthorized
  • user gains access to a system or network and remains there for an extended period of time without being detected) 

Cost of attack

Cyber attacks not only can disrupt service but they have financial implications to repair them. 

  • 38% cost less than $100k 
  • 10% costing $100k-$1 million 
  • 2%
  • of the respondents claiming the cyber attack cost their company $1 million - $10 million  

Furthermore, as cyber security and privacy implications can come via third parties, many organizations are now putting cyber security and data protection agreements in place with third party vendors. 64% claim they do have third party cyber security agreements with their vendors in place whilst 36% they do not have a cyber security in place for vendors 

Bring your own device to work 

As we live in a smartphone era, more and more organizations are moving towards requiring or allowing their staff to use their own devices for work. However, this brings with it a number of security and privacy challenges as personal smartphones contain both personal and private company information. Forty-four percent of critical communications reported using their personal devices for work.

“While cybersecurity incidents affect every industry around the world, an attack within the critical communications ecosystem which includes police, fire and emergency services has the potential to affect people’s lives. As hacks become more frequent and sophisticated it is imperative that any organization working within the ecosystem has the most sophisticated cybersecurity systems in place to avoid interruption of their crucial services,” Stephanie McCall, show director for IWCE says.

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