2013 Information security breaches survey - PWC / BIS

We were commissioned by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) to survey companies across the UK on cyber security incidents and emerging trends. This survey aimed to provide greater awareness amongst UK business of the risks, insights on how companies are mitigating those risks (or not) and key trends. 

The survey results can also provide companies with information to benchmark themselves against others in their sector and beyond.

Key highlights in this year’s results include:

• Security breaches reached their highest ever levels, costing UK organisations billions of pounds every year
• The rise is most notable in small businesses, who are now experiencing incident levels previously only seen in larger organisations
• Cost of breaches vary widely with several individual breaches costing over £1m
• Attacks by outsiders are increasing with the average large business facing a significant attack every few days
• Staff breaches also played a key role, with 36% of the worst breaches due to inadvertent human error
• Despite businesses prioritising security, it is not being translated into effective security defences – 42% of large organisations don't provide any ongoing security awareness training for their staff
• Businesses continue to struggle to keep up with security trends as well as addressing basic issues such as patch management
• We are beginning to see the impact of emerging technologies on information security – 14% of large organisations had a security breach related to social networking sites and 9% experienced a breach related to smartphones or tablets

You can download the full technical report and two-page executive summary below:

• Executive summary

• Full technical report

• Explore some of the key statistics from the survey