The ground-breaking survey conducted by the IRT SystemX with French SMEs and VSEs, victims of cyberattacks, reveals the real impact of cyber-damage and shatters two widely held beliefs: the number of successful cyber-attacks proves to be much higher than the estimates usually made public, while the average cost of cyberattacks turns out to be much lower than supposed.
SystemX reveals the main lessons of its first 3-year field survey of more than 60 French companies, mainly SMEs / VSEs with fewer than 50 people, victims of cyberattacks. All economic regions and sectors are represented. The objective of this survey was to measure the damage caused to the economic fabric, and then to develop models for calculating the costs as well as the exposure of a company at risk. It also made it possible to collect weak signals, heralding new trends, and in particular changes to be expected in the modus operandi of certain forms of attacks
Among the categories of attacks studied, cryptovirus ransomitation and fraud to the president and false transfer orderstake the top spot. Also encountered were: fraudulent technical support, messaging control, hacking, sentiment fraud, identity theft, poor camera protection, domain name capture, defacing or bank account theft. Note the great rarity of DDos attacks by denial of service against SMEs, which is one of the unexpected results of this investigation and confirms that this type of attack results most of all from an intentional targeting of a third party.
