Number of cyber attacks on Austrian companies tripled

2023-05-03 10:51:00

In a survey by KPMG auditors, all 903 companies surveyed reported phishing attacks. In nine out of ten companies, someone else has pretended to be a manager in order to cheat the company (CEO fraud). Every tenth attack was successful. Weeks of operational failures followed for almost half of the affected companies.

While cyberattacks are cheap to carry out, the cost to victims is often high. For 12 percent of the companies surveyed, the financial damage was more than 1 million euros, almost half had to raise up to 100,000 euros. “This can clearly pose a threat to the company’s existence,” says KPMG partner Andreas Tomek. And the situation is getting worse, writes KPMG director Robert Lamprecht. Almost two out of three companies now regard fake phone calls as normal, everyday business. Every third company has already identified a connection between the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine and cyber attacks on their own company. A good half of the companies surveyed see their business existence threatened by cyber attacks. The increasing interest of the attackers in the critical infrastructure is particularly worrying.

A third of the companies surveyed were victims of blackmail (ransomware), a fifth were affected by deep fakes, i.e. videos or photos that are deceptively real. In the meantime, it is also common to influence one’s professional environment via privately used social networks. And the majority assumes that cyber attacks will increase in the coming months, according to the 2023 edition of the “Cybersecurity in Austria” study, published for the eighth time by KPMG with the Security Forum Digital Economy of the Competence Center Safe Austria (KSÖ). became.

Lamprecht points out that different types of threats are being used in parallel and targeted disinformation campaigns are becoming more common. State or state-sponsored attacks (Advanced Persistent Threats, APTs) are a particular challenge for 72 percent of those surveyed.