Last week’s hacker attack, which remains unsolved, clearly shows how vulnerable society is to data breaches. Now figures that TV4 Nyheterna have seen show that the number of overload attacks has increased sharply in the past year.
– It’s something we see daily in our business, partly big well-known hacks that we read about in SWEDEN. But that it actually also affects private individuals and smaller companies to an increasingly greater extent. It is not only high-security users who are affected, says Mattias Danielsson, CEO of the IT security company Yubico.
A week has passed since the extensive hacker attack against the IT supplier Tietoevry. Which resulted in the IT systems of the majority of companies, regions and municipalities being shut down. According to new figures from the Crime Prevention Council, reported data breaches have increased sharply in the past year.
Almost 300 percent increase
This mainly applies to data breaches through overload attacks, i.e. where a website or a server is overloaded, to make it temporarily unavailable. It increased by a whopping 285 percent.
– I would think that it is about sabotage. There are not so many commercial incentives, but they want to disrupt the business. There, Sweden is a bigger target today, says Mattias Danielsson.
The sharp increase in reported data breaches shows that the situation is serious
says the Minister of Civil Defense.
The Minister: Serious situation
– This is part of the deteriorating security policy situation that Sweden is experiencing, and which underlines the seriousness of this situation, and which underlines that we as a society need to catch up with our cyber security work in order to achieve a generally higher level, says Carl-Oscar Bohlin.
According to the IT security company Yubico, the dark figure is large when it comes to reported data breaches.
– When it comes to the more publicized attacks that affect large companies and authorities, they are reported to the police. But when it comes to private individuals and smaller companies, there are probably many attacks that never show up in the statistics, says Mattias Danielsson.