BANGALORE,INDIA: McAfee, Inc. today released research findings that organizations (51 to 1,000 employees) are cutting their security budgets at the same time that cyber threats are escalating, according to McAfee’s report The Security Paradox.

The study found that more than half of Indian companies surveyed have seen more security incidents in the past year (63 per cent), and one in five mid size organizations around the world has had a single incident that cost an average of US$41K as loss of revenue. The study reveals that 70 per cent of the Indian companies reported spending more than a day on recovering from IT security attacks.

This paradox occurs in part because these types of companies are under the mistaken impression that hackers prefer to target larger companies. Almost half of global organizations surveyed (43 per cent) think larger organizations with 501+ employees are most at risk for a security attack. In truth, organizations with less than 500 employees actually suffer from more attacks on average.

“Companies in India are becoming increasingly aware of the threats of IT security attacks. It’s heartening to see that a significant number of organizations have increased their budgets in 2009 on IT security despite the downward pressure on finances and resources. According to our research, organizations that put more effort on preventing attacks can end up spending less than a third as much as those that allow themselves to be at risk. Hence, adopting preventive security measures should be taken as a serious concern by every organization”, said Kartik Shahani, Regional Director for India, McAfee, Inc.

McAfee’s study found that 81 per cent of the Indian organizations surveyed spend less than four hours a week on IT security pro actively and, around 70 per cent of them spend more than a day recovering from IT security attacks. Threats and responses varied greatly from country to country, but uniformly the countries where companies invested the least time on prevention—Canada and France among them—suffered the greatest financial losses and downtime from cybercrime when it happened, requiring a week or longer to recover from their most recent cyber attack.

Additional India specific results:

·         67 per cent of the Indian companies are very concerned about their business being a target for cyber crime

·         India and China have the largest amount of unreported data leaks, with 35 per cent and 32 per cent respectively

·         38 per cent of the Indian companies surveyed one or more incidents of data breaches in the last one year

·         63 per cent of Indian companies witnessed an increase in IT security incidents from 2008 to 2009

·         73 per cent of Indian companies fear that a serious data breach could put their organization to out of business

·         47 per cent Indian suffered more than 20 security incidents in the past one year

·         An Indian company spends an average of $28,447 per year in combating various types of IT security attacks (data loss, endpoint protection, email threats, website threats and network security threats)

 
McAfee’s report The Security Paradox was conducted by MSI International and looked at security spending in the last year by companies with 51-1,000 employees in India, Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. The results were compared to previous studies conducted in Europe and North America.