Written by Tuba Ayele, CNN
Research released by Bitdefender researchers on Monday shows that companies based in Canada are facing higher costs from corporate data breaches than their counterparts in other countries.
Bitdefender’s 2017 annual Cybersecurity Attrition report found that the average cost of a network breach in Canada is $441,907, higher than in the US, Germany, the UK, France, the Netherlands and Spain, with an average cost of $415,028.
“The research points to a diverse group of culprits with varying motives. Weak implementation of enterprise security that enables insider or hacker penetration is a common denominator in all instances of breaches,” the report noted.
The report also found that the top 3 most targeted companies in 2018 — China Mobile, Cisco Systems and Japan Airlines — were hit by “targeted” attacks from Russia, the United States and China, respectively.
The US remained the most targeted country in the world for 2017, followed by China, Japan, the UK, Germany, France, France, Russia, Canada, South Korea, South Africa, Australia, Brazil, Turkey, the UAE, India, India, China, Sweden, Israel, India, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, UAE, Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Panama, Taiwan, Malaysia, South Africa, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Columbia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Argentina, and Ecuador.
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Researchers said insider attacks remain a serious security concern because of how the data is shared across different organizational silos.
Meanwhile, ransomware attacks present a new threat and “new norms in attacks which aim to escape detection, go undetected and have additional targets such as web applications and web applications used by third parties,” the report noted.
With the cost of data breaches rising globally in 2017, Canada has been recognized for its cybersecurity leadership.
In June, a ransomware attack called Mirai caused chaos in major cities across the world.
This exploit went undetected in 2017 and impacted several major companies, governments and infrastructure with little or no public security awareness, the experts noted.