About one-third of cyberattacks against corporations are successful, according to a report from consulting firm Accenture, with large firms facing more than 100 targeted attacks every year. Nonetheless, security heads at the more than 2,000 large companies surveyed are still "unaccountably confident in their security strategies."
More than half of survey respondents said attacks came from internal security breaches, but most defensive efforts focused on protecting against external attacks. The breaches sometimes took months to detect — 17 percent of companies said they discovered attacks "within a year" or longer — and 98 percent of intrusions were reported by employees outside the security team.
The survey comes at a time when high-profile attacks on large American entities, both public and private, are becoming increasingly frequent: The Democratic Party faced a wave of hacks in the months leading up to the 2016 election, and a massive, highly sophisticated denial-of-service attack in October brought down more than 80 internet giants, including Amazon, Twitter, PayPal, Reddit, and many others.
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Data breaches cost global businesses $2 trillion annually, a number that could rise to $90 trillion by 2030 if current trends continue.
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