Cybersecurity has become a key focus area for businesses during the pandemic as the number of hack attacks continue to grow.
Having polled more than 800 business leaders of companies in India, Germany, the UK and the US, Microsoft revealed that 58% of the companies had increased their security budgets and 22% had decreased it, leaving 19% seeing no change at all.
Moreover, 82% planned to up the number of staff members working in their security departments.
However, at the same time 81% felt pressured to lower the security costs.
Looking at their overall investments, Microsoft revealed that 20% had invested in multi-factor authentication solutions, 17% had invested in endpoint device protections, 16% in anti-phishing tools, 14% in VPNs, and 12% had put money towards educating their end users.
Similar to previous reports, Microsoft Threat Intelligence teams reported a spike in Covid-19 attacks in early March as cybercriminals applied pandemic themed lures to known scams and malware.
The business leaders polled saw phishing threats as the biggest risk to security during the early outbreak, with 90% suggesting that phishing attacks have impacted their organisation.
Microsoft’s report comes just weeks after research by Hitachi ID showed that 89% said cybersecurity is now a main priority following the outbreak of the pandemic.
Copyright © 2018 RegTech Analyst
