Cybersecurity professionals are concerned that they are being targeted by various state-funded hackers.

Nearly two-thirds of information security professionals believe that cyberspace is a threat to organization as state-sponsored cyberattacks become more common and larger in scale - and concerns are even greater among chief information security officers, with nearly three-quarters seeing cyberspace as a threat to their organizations.

However, there is still a significant proportion who do not believe that cyberspace is a threat to their businesses and more than a quarter of companies have no strategy on how to protect themselves from cyber attacks carried out using tools developed by various states.

The attitudes of thousands of cybersecurity professionals have been analyzed in its global study Bitdefender, which describes what the security industry thinks about the challenges faced by businesses - and a significant number of professionals believe that cyber warfare is an imminent threat.

Security professionals surveyed said the consequences of an attack launched as part of a cyber campaign could be information loss, loss of reputation, business shutdowns and job losses.

And in most cases, organizations that fall victim to cyber-attacks are likely to be collateral losses of attacks carried out by different states.

For example, the NotPetya has shut down networks around the world after causing billions of dollars in damage and is in an attack that probably started in Russia and got out of control. The target was in Ukraine, but the nature of the internet caused damage far beyond what was anticipated.

But while many organizations are aware of the potential dangers of being involved in a cybercrime campaign, some strains they do not see it as a problem or have a plan for how to deal with it.

"The reason is that a quarter of them professionals security does not really have a strategy to protect against cyberspace is due to complacency. They never had to face one attack, so they have not invested in protectionSaid Liviu Arsene, a global cybersecurity researcher at Bitdefender.

"They probably think they are too young to be targeted or they did not have an event from which to recover," he added.

However, incidents like NotPetya, ransomware WannaCry and others have shown that organizations of all sizes can fall victim to a government attack developed at national level.

Source: en.secnews.gr