UK businesses are the slowest to identify anomalies in their networks compared to other major markets, new research has revealed.
UK firms estimate that it takes them an average of nine hours to find unusual activity on their networks, compared to seven hours in the US, eight hours in Germany, and just five hours in Australia.
The delay means it is estimated that an additional 280,000 could be accessed and stolen during the extra time it takes the firms to react, based on a business line bandwidth of 100Mbit with a theoretical maximum of 45+GB/hour, and an average taken document size of 321kb.
The data comes from cyber security firm Clearswift, whose SVP Dr. Guy Bunker said: "Cyber attacks by unscrupulous individuals are becoming a major problem and it’s time for the UK to wake up to this fact.
"Speed holds the key and when it comes to speed of response, firms need to think in minutes not hours, constantly striving for better. Better still, organisations need to take a proactive stance. It is unfortunately a ‘when’ not an ‘if’ scenario."
Only 14% of respondents believed that their firm had suffered a serious internal data breach, showing external threats are still taken more seriously than internal threats.
Bunker said: "New external and internal factors should influence how your organisation obtains, stores, shares and deploys information. These can all affect how information could become vulnerable, and where the next threat is coming from."
500 IT Decision makers and 4000 employees were polled for the survey.
