APAC cyber risk declines, but successful attacks to come

Cyber risk levels in Asia Pacific (APAC) have improved from the first half to the second half of 2022, according to the latest survey on cyber risk from Trend Micro. 

Nevertheless, organisations remain pessimistic about the threat landscape, with 82% anticipating successful attacks this year.

The findings come from Trend Micros biannual Cyber Risk Index (CRI) report, which measures the gap between respondents cybersecurity preparedness versus their likelihood of being attacked. In the second half of 2022, the CRI surveyed more than 3,700 CISOs, IT practitioners, and managers across North America, Europe, Latin/South America, and APAC.

In APAC, enhanced cyber preparedness is a key driver of improved cyber risk levels, which has shifted from elevated to moderate. However, organisations cannot rest on their laurels with the prospect of threats looming.

Three in four organisations cited that it was somewhat to very likely that they would suffer a breach of customer data (74%), intellectual property (74%) or a successful cyberattack (82%). These figures represent declines of just 2%, 4% and 7% respectively, from the results of the CRI in the first half of 2022.

"We have seen a drastic improvement in the APAC cyber risk index since the first half of 2022, with figures moving into positive territory at 0.05 from negative levels," says Nilesh Jain, Vice President, Southeast Asia & India, Trend Micro.

"This is a promising result as it means that organisations have greatly stepped up to improve their cyber preparedness. It is crucial for organisations to continue this momentum by focusing on the threats that matter most to their business this year. The first step is to gain complete and continuous attack surface visibility and control."

To address new complexities arising from an expanding attack surface, security teams need to bolster their capabilities in proactive attack surface risk management. 

On top of architecture improvements for enhanced interoperability, scalability and agility, having a unified cybersecurity platform with extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities is also critical in enhancing security teams visibility and response to cyberthreats across internal and external systems, accounts and devices. This would give organisations a leg-up in understanding, communicating, and mitigating expected risks.

Expected cyber threats in APAC this year

Organisations in APAC cited business email compromise (BEC) and clickjacking among the top five cyber threats that they expect to experience this year.

Current infrastructure security risks of organisations in APAC

In APAC, the primary risks are people related. APAC respondents named employees as representing three of their top five infrastructure risks.