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recent cyber attacks 2020 uk

Published May 17, 2021 | Category: Uncategorized

For charities, analysis by size is primarily considered in terms of annual income band. September saw students around the globe returning to classes, only to be met with an avalanche of cyber attacks. For charities, the proportion is also higher than in 2018. Relatively few businesses or charities picked up on these breaches through security monitoring or via antivirus software. The previous reports are also available. Supply chain attacks were up 78% in 2019. This charity was trying to link its IT system with the local council, so they could make referrals to council services. The latter is more prevalent across medium businesses (34%, vs. 23% overall) and large businesses (47%). Ipsos MORI and DCMS would like to thank all the organisations and individuals who participated in the survey. Large businesses were more likely to have each of these rules and processes in place than others. more businesses (69%, vs. 58% in 2018 – when this was first asked) and charities (61%, vs. 32% in 2018) backing up their data on cloud servers. This was even the case among organisations that took their own cyber security seriously and considered themselves to be following best practice. The government-endorsed Cyber Essentials scheme enables organisations to be independently certified for having met a good-practice standard in cyber security. close. The data have been weighted to be statistically representative of these two populations. For charities specifically, several controls are applied more widely now than in 2018, including: • regularly updating software (84%, vs. 75% in 2018), • restricting IT admin rights (82% vs. 65%), • only allowing access via the organisation’s devices (42% vs. 32%). The Cyber Security Breaches Survey is an official statistic and has been produced to the standards set out in the Code of Practice for Statistics. Read here. Loss of personal data was seen as a more serious reputational risk and one that could incur fines, “We work with a lot of freelance artists. Read here. The business findings show a small increase in BYOD this year (53%, vs. 44% in 2019). Charities are also less likely than businesses to have security controls on electronic devices or to restrict access to their own devices. Attacks can hinder a business's productivity, harm its reputation and cause it to lose its competitive edge. It is clear from the trend findings that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has played a major role in getting organisations to review and update cyber security policies and processes. Figure 3.1: Extent to which cyber security is seen as a high or low priority for directors, trustees and other senior managers. Figure 6.2: Percentage of organisations that take the following actions, or have these measures in place, for when they experience a cyber security incident. However, these are more likely to be high-impact attacks, for example if they prevent customers from reaching an organisation online. One interviewee praised the use of infographics for this purpose. An industrial control system (ICS) is a digital control system used to control industrial processes such as manufacturing, raw materials and energy production, distribution and telecommunications. Security Strategy, it has worked to make the UK the safest place to live and work online. This involved transferring personal data to the printer. These findings have changed over time. This is a joint alert from the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). Very few organisations have experienced these kinds of breaches or attacks in past years – among those that identified any breaches or attacks in the 2019 survey, nine per cent of businesses and seven per cent of charities had faced denial-of-service attacks. Cyber-attacks are nothing new, though. This includes the full report, infographics and the technical and methodological information for each year. The qualitative research also suggests that current communications, both around supplier risks and reporting of breaches, can be confusing for organisations. 100 Parliament Street Financial audits by external accountants generated an annual report that would be discussed at a board level. This year’s survey focuses on the types of digital exposure that might vary across different organisations and sectors, such as the ability to take payments or orders online, or the storage of personal data. Some of the less commonly mentioned aspects for both businesses and charities are data classification, cloud computing and what can be stored on removable devices. Not all these audits focused solely on cyber security. The mean and median scores exclude “don’t know” and “refused” responses. Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2020: Education Institutions Findings Annex Chapter 2: Key findings 2.1 Incidence and impact of cyber security breaches or attacks It is important to remember that the survey can only measure the breaches or attacks that organisations have themselves identified. Smaller organisations often sought informal advice and guidance from their external IT or cyber security providers. Our interviews found that organisations are often primed to discuss cyber security during financial audits, during annual meetings with insurance brokers and when engaging with HMRC for their tax returns. There was sometimes uncertainty about the target audience within an organisation for the Small Business Guide and Small Charity Guide – whether they were aimed at management boards, technical staff or wider staff. As might be expected, insurance cover is more prevalent in the finance and insurance sector itself. Nevertheless, they continue to show that specific cyber security policies are taken on only by a very small minority of organisations. Even breaches that do not result in negative financial consequences or data loss can still have an impact on organisations. However, approaches to incident response are typically not very comprehensive. This publication is licensed under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0 except where otherwise stated. ↩, This category previously defined monitoring as organisations carrying out any monitoring of user activity or carrying out any business-as-usual health checks. List of data breaches and cyber attacks in June 2020 ­– 7 billion records breached. Even before Covid-19 took hold in the UK, supply chain, sales and distribution were becoming increasingly affected by border closures, factory stoppages and retail restrictions worldwide. We also provide broad estimates of the financial cost of these breaches or attacks. We’d like to set additional cookies to understand how you use GOV.UK, remember your settings and improve government services. A permanent loss of data is much less common, which might be expected given that 89 per cent of businesses and 77 per cent of charities back up their data in some way (as noted in Chapter 4). Half of all finance and insurance firms have some sort of coverage against cyber security breaches (51%, vs. 32% overall). As the chart indicates, this behaviour is more common in the construction sector. 2020. Temporary loss of access to files or networks, damaged software or systems, and lost money are the most commonly reported outcomes. You can find October 2020’s list of cyber attacks and data breaches here. A separate annex, available on the same GOV.UK page, summarises the results from a smaller survey of 287 education institutions, carried out for the first time this year. Among the 46 per cent of business and 26 per cent of charities that identified breaches or attacks, the vast majority of businesses (91%) informed their senior managers or directors of their most disruptive breach. 2020 the busiest year on record for cyber attacks against UK firms Hacking attempts surged by 20% as hackers took advantage of factors such as … The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre found evidence that Russian military intelligence hackers had been planning a disruptive cyber attack on the later-postponed 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Ultimately, the extent to which organisations recognised and took action around supplier-related cyber security risks depended on several broad factors: • if suppliers handled personal data for the organisation in any way, it was typical for organisations to draw up rules and processes around this in formal contracts. Most organisations have not formally reviewed these risks before (Figure 4.2). Therefore, the findings we report here are very broad. We use some essential cookies to make this website work. It is also probable that many organisations were prompted to review their documentation as a result of GDPR but have not been prompted as much to do this since then. However, as covered earlier in this chapter, the proportion that do have policies has risen consistently since 2018. However, their IT system did not meet the council’s security requirements. For charities, the three years of data show a gradually rising incidence, from 19 per cent in 2018 and 22 per cent in 2019, to 26 per cent in 2020. The idea of reporting personal data breaches to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) – a requirement under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – also came up frequently. • other supplier considerations often drowned out cyber security. You can change your cookie settings at any time. Share page. We calculate these percentages by merging together the proportions that identified any of the different types of breaches or attacks mentioned in the survey. Our estimates suggest that even in these sectors, the use of ICS is relatively niche. Furthermore, seven in ten businesses (72%) and charities (68%) say it took no time at all to recover, shown in Figure 5.7. When looking at sector differences, there is no indication that particular sectors tend to favour internal audits over external ones, or vice versa. As Figure 4.8 shows, this long-term change is also seen among medium and large businesses – the ones most likely to have big management boards. For large businesses, this result is lower than in previous years (e.g. The five specific documents or links we covered included: It is worth noting that this was not detailed user testing. half of businesses (51%) and four in ten charities (38%) update their senior management on cyber security at least quarterly. Finance and insurance firms are also more likely to have business continuity plans (82%, vs. 39% overall). Cybersecurity issues are becoming a day-to-day struggle for businesses. In addition, organisations do not always make cyber security improvements in and of themselves, but in response to broader technological changes. Chinese state-sponsored hackers broke into the networks of the Vatican to conduct espionage in the lead-up to negotiations about control over the appointment of bishops and the status of churches in China. For example, for a question where 50% of the 1,348 businesses sampled in the survey give a particular answer, the chances are 95 in 100 that this result would not vary more or less than 3.5 percentage points from the true figure – the figure that would have been obtained had the entire UK business population responded to the survey. Recovery costs, as per the survey, include: • additional staff time needed to deal with the breach or to inform customers or stakeholders, • costs to repair equipment or infrastructure, Table 5.3: Average recovery cost of the most disruptive breach or attack from the last 12 months. The qualitative interviews add a wider context to the survey findings around audits. Other than this change, these findings are largely consistent with previous years. It is important to note that these trends may have been affected by the omission of denial-of-service attacks from this year’s survey script. In 2020, a fifth of these charities (22%) say they experience breaches at least once a week. For example, in 2019, they were mentioned by 17 per cent. DCMS statisticians can be followed on Twitter via @DCMSInsight. Three-quarters of charities say this about their senior management (74%, up from 53% in 2018). Figure 5.7: How long it took organisations to restore operations back to normal after their most disruptive breach or attack was identified. It will take only 2 minutes to fill in. Don’t worry we won’t send you spam or share your email address with anyone. However, continuous improvement is not guaranteed. This change is likely to relate to GDPR. Research by cyber-security company CrowdStrike, found that two-thirds of businesses had suffered a supply chain software attack during 2018 2. • the proportion of businesses carrying out cyber-related risk assessments has increased by 11 percentage points since 2018. It is important to remember that the survey can only measure the breaches or attacks that organisations have themselves identified. There are too few charities in the sample (ones that have reported breaches externally) to analyse in this way Figure 6.3. The nature of cyber attacks has also changed since 2017. Large businesses are the most likely to have implemented all 10 Steps (42%, vs. 12% overall). Almost half of businesses (46%) and a quarter of charities (26%) report having cyber security breaches or attacks in the last 12 months. Password security was found to be particularly weak, with 66% of firms not requiring remote workers to use a password manager or implement any authentication methods beyond a password. Nonetheless, the 2019 data are markedly different from the other years. The topic can be framed in many ways, including reporting to IT or cyber security providers as part of the incident response process, reporting financial losses to banks and insurance companies, public declarations to customers or suppliers, or reporting to wider authorities such as the police. Nevertheless, these results have continued to improve between 2019 and 2020. Recent attacks against the gaming industry in 2020 – Phishing attacks started to affect game players and gaming companies. Cyber-attacks against anti-racism organisations shot up in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a leading provider of protection services says. The UK Government’s Cyber security skills in the UK labour market 2020 report says just under 400,000 cybersecurity-related jobs were posted over the past three years in the UK. It reflects the fact that most breaches or attacks do not have any material outcome (a loss of assets or data), so do not always need a response. Notifying others or having a communications plan in place tend to be less prevalent. One of the consistent lessons across this series of surveys has been the importance of staff vigilance, given that the vast majority of breaches and attacks being identified are ones that will come via them. Nevertheless, we still broadly conclude that the downward trends in Figure 5.8 are real, because they reflect a gradual change across multiple years, and because other outcomes and impacts not associated with denial-of-service attacks have also diminished. On the whole, supplier risks appear to be a more neglected aspect of cyber security. As might be expected, this is much more common in larger organisations, where the management board is likely to be larger – in half of medium businesses (50%) and seven in ten large businesses (68%), there are board members overseeing cyber security. One interviewee said it would be useful to have some best practice guidance for dealing with supplier risks. Linked to this, organisations with this kind of cyber insurance often had to meet certain standards to qualify or to reduce their premiums. In 2020, a fifth of these charities (22%) say they experience breaches at least once a week. Cyber threats have risen as remote working using personal devices looks set to continue. In this case, the rise fits with the increasing engagement with cyber security that charities have shown since 2018, and the fact that more have taken actions to identify cyber risks (discussed in Chapters 3 and 4). ransoms paid and hardware replaced) but this is just the beginning. “The events of the last year have hit the manufacturing sector hard, with business owners scrambling to preserve jobs and establish a route through ever-changing restrictions and world-wide challenges to their ability to succeed,” said Darren Guccione, CEO and co-founder of Keeper Security. These questions are asked of the 46 per cent of business and 26 per cent of charities that have identified breaches or attacks, rather than the full sample. when they interacted with banks), and wider awareness of data protection because of GDPR. From the point of view of interviewees, there was typically a binary divide between these types of suppliers and their wider, non-digital service suppliers. ↩, This is an unprompted question. “I think staff and management have become aware from media and news, and various thing externally, without us having to make them aware. The study also found that these three industries accounted for 62 per cent of all cyber-attacks in 2020, up 11 per cent from the previous year. However, our qualitative research indicates that the quality of these audits varies greatly. Table 4.1 below brings these findings together. However, the changes over time also suggest that, among businesses, there was a spike in discussions with senior managers following the introduction of GDPR (between fieldwork for the 2018 and 2019 surveys), and that since this high point, updates to senior managers have become less frequent again. The proportion of charities reporting that they hold personal data about customers or beneficiaries rose between the 2018 and 2019 surveys (from 44% to 58%). Over six in ten businesses (64%) and charities (61%) have taken at least one of the actions shown in Figure 4.1 in the last 12 months, to help identify cyber security risks. 43% for forensic analysis). This broad pattern is similar across size bands and sectors. They may be another channel through which to distribute the existing government guidance materials on cyber security. In contrast to internal upwards reporting, which is very common, external reporting of breaches has historically been very rare. Where we have identified any third party copyright information you will need to obtain permission from the copyright holders concerned. We also came across a great deal of confusion on this topic. More formalised and sophisticated audits tended to have more technical elements, which could range from scanning and patching software through to simulation attacks. We discussed in last year’s report that this may have been due to charities becoming more aware of what constitutes personal data due to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), rather than an actual change in the volume of personal data being handled. It is important to note that our survey is carried out with the individual within each organisation who is most responsible for cyber security. Percentage results are therefore subject to margins of error, which vary with the size of the sample and the percentage figure concerned. It was a familiarly bad cyber security story in June, with 92 security incidents and at least 7,021,195,399 breached records. This means that around four in ten organisations have done none of these things. For the latter, we have imputed numeric values from the given banded values. Companies that are working in the field of video games are experiencing DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks.. Gaming companies, like other businesses, are often targeted by hackers who try to locate compromised accounts and launch attacks against them. In the qualitative interviews, we explored how organisations’ attitudes and approaches to cyber security had evolved over the past five years and what had led to these changes. However, the long-term trend does suggest that more businesses are now covering cloud computing in cyber security policies (up from 52% in 2016 to 60% in 2020). Instead, they often made wider technological changes and then updated their cyber security policies and processes around these changes. This includes accidental breaches, as well as ones perpetrated intentionally. When excluding these cases, we find that businesses reported externally only in a quarter of cases (27%). Organisations that had standalone cyber security insurance policies tended to have more specific reasons for purchasing this insurance, compared to general business insurance that also covers cyber risks. Luke Irwin 30th January 2020. As another new question for 2020, we asked those who have relevant insurance policies to tell us what this coverage provides them with. For all percentage results[footnote 3], subgroup differences by size, and sector, as well as changes since the previous surveys, have been highlighted only where statistically significant (at the 95% level of confidence)[footnote 4]. 102 publicly disclosed incidents listed this month, as well ( e.g August. 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