Security News > 2021 > November > How likely are mid-market organizations to experience a breach by the end of 2021?

Report results show that mid-size companies are largely unprotected due to the fact that they lack the immense team resources, expensive products and expertise needed to protect against these increasing attacks, as the cybersecurity market has evolved mainly to serve large enterprises - and yet, the mid-market sector is getting hit by cyber attacks with a frequency and sophistication on par with large enterprises.

Email malware attacks have increased 154% between 2020 and 2021, but only 1% of mid-size companies have email malware protection in place in 2021 - with 88% of that number having misconfigured the protection settings.

The numbers fare even worse for lesser known attacks such as Wi-Fi phishing, which have increased 203%: less than 1% of mid-size companies have any kind of Wi-Fi phishing protection in place, and those who do have a misconfiguration rate of 90%. The number of attacks on mid-market organizations in every sector increased by at least 50% between 2020 and 2021.

In 2021, the proportion of naïve attacks - the least sophisticated attack type - dropped from 86% to 68%, while customized attacks and insider threats - both targeted attacks that are the most lethal and damaging - are expanding 4x and 2x respectively, revealing bad actors' ability to scale more intelligent assaults against a broader range of organizations.

Mid-market organizations are as much as 490% or more likely to experience a security breach by the end of 2021 as they were in 2019.

The growth of cyber attacks and the increase in threat vectors targeting mid-size companies since the start of the pandemic, combined with the failure of the security industry to provide viable security solutions geared toward the mid-market sector and the widespread misconfiguration of the few security solutions that have been deployed, have resulted in an alarming increase in the likelihood of experiencing a devastating breach.

News URL

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2021/11/25/mid-market-organizations-breach-2021/