courtesy Coro
A new report from cybersecurity company Coro predicts escalating cyber attacks on transportation and trucking companies that are supporting an already duressed supply chain this holiday season.
Nearly 30% of transportation and logistics organizations reported more than 20 supply chain disruptions via cyber attack last year, according to BCI’s Supply Chain Resilience Report 2021 – up from just 4.8% reporting the same number in 2019.
Across all industries, Coro found the number of cyber attacks is increasing, but transportation stands out as one of the fastest growing sectors with attacks already having risen almost 150% between January 2020 and today.
The loss of manufacturing and logistics capacity, and employee-power, bundled with increasing demand for goods, creates a potentially weak and vulnerable infrastructure for cybercriminals to break through.
McAfee Enterprise and FireEye this month released its Cybercrime in a Pandemic World: The Impact of COVID-19 findings, revealing the imminent need for organizations to prioritize and strengthen their cybersecurity architecture. The findings indicate that during the pandemic, 81% of global organizations experienced increased cyber threats with 79% experiencing downtime due to a cyber incident during a peak season. As the holiday season approaches, supply chain and logistics, e-commerce and retail, and the travel industry see predictable increases in consumer and business activity, making them more vulnerable to cyber threats and leaving business, employee and consumer data at risk.
Coro's report noted that attacks trend significantly upward during the holiday season, and in transportation the average number of attacks during the final four months of this year are spiking 43% over January to August 2021 monthly averages. Attacks on transportation companies for December are projected to be more than 58% over January 2021.
“It is imperative all businesses prioritize security technology to keep them protected, especially during the peak holiday season,” said Bryan Palma, CEO of FireEye-McAfee. “Ninety-four percent of IT professionals want their organization to improve its overall cyber readiness. Businesses must do more and need an intelligent security architecture for managing today’s sophisticated threat landscape.”
Coro CEO Guy Moskowitz said that mid-market companies (companies with between 100 and 1,500 employees) were especially vulnerable due to a lack of resources to combat cyberthreats that now target employees who work from anywhere in the world, including home.
“While we’ve seen broader-reaching protection developed for the large enterprise, the cyber security industry is not prioritizing mid-market needs. Now, growing businesses remain entirely exposed in the face of truly unprecedented levels of cyber attacks, which are rapidly increasing not only in volume and sophistication but also in range and lethality,” he said. “The market has failed to protect these essential businesses."
