Britons’ worries about cyber attacks grow after high profile hacks against Ashley Madison and Carphone Warehouse
Fear of exposure to cyber crime is growing, on the back of several recent high-profile hacks that have left 71 per cent of British workers worried that data theft is “inevitable”.
In August hackers exposed private information about 37m users of adultery website Ashley Madison. Not long after, a data breach at Carphone Warehouse put millions of customers’ information at risk.
These are just the most recent examples of hacks that have made headlines across the world. And data theft like this is not without consequences, as a study from Citrix has showed that Britons are more worried about data theft than ever.
Chris Mayers, chief security architect at Citrix, said:
The sheer number of high-profile data breaches in the last 12 months has resulted in workers feeling more vulnerable to hackers than ever before.
Young people are especially worried, as one in three 16-25-year-olds feel much more exposed to hacks than they did before. This is twice as many as over-55s. According to Mayers, this is because the younger age group is “more likely to have large volumes of important data stored and maintained online”.
Cybercrime costs global business over £200bn annually – and the finance sector is the worst exposed, with one in four businesses reporting they were victims of a hack in the past year.