More Australian organisations have focused on boosting their cyber resilience, according to Trend Micro's latest Cyber Risk Index (CRI).

The index, published by Trend Micro in partnership with Ponemon Institute, investigated cyber risks and identified key areas for improving cybersecurity. It also measured the gap between organisations' current security position and the likelihood of being attacked.

The latest index revealed that the Australian CRI improved from -0.54 in the first half of 2022 (H1 2022) to -0.12 in the second half of 2022 (H2 2022), reflecting organisations' efforts to improving their cyber resilience.

However, many Australian organisations remain pessimistic over the coming year, with most respondents saying it was “somewhat very likely” they would suffer customer data breach (79%), IP (80%), or a successful cyberattack (84%).

“There is still much to be done, as employees remain a source of risk. The first step to managing this is to gain complete and continuous attack surface visibility and control,” said Mick McCluney, technical director for Australia at Trend Micro, as reported by ITWire.

Top cyber threats

Globally the top four threats in the Trend Micro CRI H2 2022 include:

• clickjacking;
• ransomware;
• crypto-mining; and
• login attacks (credential theft).

In Australia, organisations named employees as two of their five infrastructure risks:

• negligent insiders;
• cloud computing infrastructure and providers;
• organisational misalignment and complexity;
• data centres; and
• mobile or remote employees.

“As the shift to hybrid working gathers momentum, organisations are rightly concerned about the risk posed by negligent employees and the infrastructure used to support remote workers. They will need to focus not only on technology solutions but people and processes to help mitigate these risks,” said Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of Ponemon Institute, as reported by ITWire.