Loss of Intellectual Property, Customer Data Pose Greatest Business Risks

Even though organizations experienced an increase in the number of attacks and breaches over the past year, many were better at detecting and responding to them – thanks to recent investments in incident response and security operations center capabilities. That's according to a recent Dark Reading survey of 215 IT and cybersecurity professionals, who identified the types of incidents posing the greatest threat to the organization’s sensitive data.

Dark Reading's "The State of Incident Response 2021" report shows that security professionals have been most concerned about breaches of intellectual property and business secrets (36%), followed by the unauthorized use of applications by credentialed users (17%). In addition, 16% said outages of internal IT systems, applications, or networks pose big organizational risks.

Trending in the right direction, respondents still view ransomware and malware infections and a data breach of customer and employee information as significant threats to the organization, but not as much as the previous year. In 2021, 48% of respondents listed ransomware and malware as potential threats, compared with 58% in 2020, while 44% in 2021 cited the loss of customer and employee data, compared with 59% in 2020. The drop appears to be associated with a greater confidence in the organization’s ability to detect potential compromise as soon as one occurs or within minutes/hours of occurrence.