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For example, one statistic shows that for medium businesses, there has been a drop since 2022 in the proportion of businesses saying they have security controls on their devices (from 91% to 79%) and agreed processes for phishing emails (from 86% to 78%). Yet, the report makes it clear that the most common attack is phishing.
Among organisations that identified breaches or attacks in the last year, 79% of businesses and 83% of charities identified these as phishing attacks.

In light of this, Andy talks about the threat of phishing and why the rise in AI and new generative AI systems like ChatGPT will create even more phishing attacks. Andy Robertson, Head of Enterprise and Cybersecurity Business at Fujitsu UK&I said:

“A rise in phishing attacks always correlates with negative economic or social events and is targeted at those who stand to benefit the most from socially engineered messaging. So, as the cost-of-living crisis continues, don’t expect cyber risks to go away.

“Cyber security experts face another hurdle too. With the big rise of artificial intelligence tools that we’re seeing in the form of generative AI and platforms such as ChatGPT, this is creating a surge in phishing attacks. For instance, Chat GPT has the ability to create cyber security attacks and these attacks can be created by someone with very little cyber security and computing experience. On the flip side, it can be very powerful, performing a lot of the heavy lifting to understand what is happening.

“Going forward, organisations must identify equally sophisticated methods to protect themselves. Now more than ever, organisations need to be reviewing their high-level accounts, who has access to them, and when the passwords were last changed, having a strict approach to Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and Conditional Access (CA).”