The LogRhythm study surveyed 1000 people and found more than two-thirds believe that pre-emptive attacks against enemies that pose a threat to national cyber security are justified.
45% of respondents said they government should raise its level of cyber protection. The majority of UK respondents believe pre-emptive are justified with only 18% saying they are unjustified.
Only 10% of respondents actually think the UK government is doing enough to protect the nation form cyber security threats.
"The issue of international cyber espionage, as well as the development of increasingly malicious malware such as Flame, Gauss and Stuxnet have unsurprisingly started to seep into public consciousness – leading to increased calls for urgent action," said Ross Brewer, vice president and managing director for international markets at LogRhythm "However, after any security incident there is usually much speculation and uncertainty of the origin. As such, the typical knee-jerk reaction of blindly attacking the networks of potential perpetrators could incite disturbing consequences such as the execution of even more sophisticated attacks on the UK’s critical infrastructure."
Personal data was also found to be a key concern in the UK when it came to security. 80% said they do not trust organisations to keep their data safe, ranking gaming sites and social networks the least trustworthy.
Over 40% of respondents said they feel it is inevitable their data will fall into the hands of hackers.
Brewer suggests that businesses and government organisations should take care to rebuild the trust in handling personal data that has faded away from numerous breaches over the past few years.
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Security experts say handing out appropriate fines to organisations who lack proper data defences could help deter the number of breaches by forcing organisation to get better data security.
"As cyber threats increase in severity and complexity, organisations need to really understand the difference between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ behaviour across every dimension of their electronic enterprise. Only then can they truly fight fire with fire," Brewer added.
