Lloyd’s of London published their Risk Index Report for 2013, and not surprisingly cyber security ranked amongst the top concerns for executives at number three worldwide and number two in the United States.

Compared to previous report in 2011 where cyber risk was rated much lower at position 12, the fact that cyber risk has risen to one of the top spots shows an awareness regarding the importance of cyber security and its affect on the business.

In the report Lloyds speculates that the increase may be due to the perception behind what is motivating cyber attacks from beyond  just financial gain, but also politics and ideology.

The average rising cost of data breaches also plays a key factor which appears to be on the rise over a two year period.  The most costly cybercrimes according to the report involved malicious code, denial of service attacks and web-based attacks where vulnerabilities are exploited.

Even with this increased risk organizations struggle to deal appropriately with the risk, finding many organizations somewhat complacent believing that they are prepared for the risk, even though their preparedness scores do not reflect that reality.

You can download the full report from Lloyds here (PDF)

Related Articles:

• Key Metrics for Risk-Based Security Management
• Are Security Metrics Too Complicated for Management?
• Majority of Organizations Committed to Risk-Based Security Management
• Security Professionals Split on Risk-Based Security Management

P.S. Have you met John Powers, supernatural CISO?

Title image courtesy of ShutterStock