More than half of UK organisations suffered a phishing attack during the COVID-19 pandemic, while over a third (36 per cent) have been hit by ransomware attacks.

A global survey of 937 IT professionals, including 120 from the UK, by cyber security firm Netwrix, found that the crisis has emboldened cyber criminals and created a fast-moving threat landscape.

The majority of these organisations reported that it took hours to detect these incidents.

The survey also found that 43 per cent of UK organisations feel they are at greater cyber security risk than before pandemic, and of those organisations, nearly all (97 per cent) had noted an escalation in cyber attacks.

In a similar vein, 82 per cent of those that believe they are at greater risk before the pandemic were also concerned about the unexpected security gaps caused by work from home initiatives.

Among the top cyber security concerns for UK organisations were insecure data sharing by employees (88 per cent), phishing (89 per cent) and supply chain compromise (90 per cent).

Concerns around supply chain compromise quadrupled from 20 per cent pre-pandemic, with almost half (47 per cent) of organisations that had this incident stating they had not been able to detect such an incident until days had passed.

Internal threats are also rising, with 80 per cent of the UK organisations are concerned about the threat of data theft by employees, compared to the 30 per cent who considered this a top threat before the pandemic.

Ilia Sotnikov, vice president of product management at Netwrix, said: “The pandemic has put additional pressure on understaffed IT teams as they have to mitigate cyber threats and secure sensitive data in less-controlled IT environments that have resulted from work from home initiatives.

“An important part of this is an organisation’s ability to reduce its attack surface by removing excessive privileges and identifying sensitive data that resides outside of secured locations."

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