Half of UK Tech, Media and Telecom Firms Have No Hacktivism Contingency

A large majority of UK technology, media and telecoms companies consider hacktivism to be a threat, but half of those asked have no contingency plans to combat a security breach.

Web security — Half of UK firms asks have no contingency in the event of a cyber attack.

Research conducted by financial services firm Deloitte and published by City AM on 10 December reveals that 70 percent of firms consider hacktivism - activism via hacking or attacks on websites - to be a threat to their business security.

Despite high profile acts of hacktivism, like those on Sony and Visa, which saw millions of PlayStation Network accounts compromised, and 1.5 million account numbers hacked respectively, half of the tech, media and telecom firms asked said they had no contingency plans in the event of a security breach.

Six in ten firms said they had been victims of a security breach in the last 12 months, as groups like Anonymous target companies either by hacking into their databases or orchestrating a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), which bombards a website with traffic until it is knocked temporarily offline.

Despite the rising popularity in cyber attacks, 48 percent of respondents said that lack of cash was the reason for not improving their online security.

Three quarters of companies said that the increased use of mobile devices for work created vulnerabilities, as more workers bring their own smartphones, laptops and tablets to work.

This tallies with predictions made by Deloitte at the end of 2012, which said that mobile devices would be the number one security threat to firms in 2012, with security breaches involving third parties in second and employee errors in third.

Working with third parties was the most common threat, cited by 78 percent of companies questioned by Deloitte.

James Alexander, a lead partner for TMT security at Deloitte said: "Companies need to act as if a breach is inevitable and have a documented response plan in place so they can react...Unfortunately not enough companies are doing this so we think companies are being overconfident in their resilience."