Juniper says 90 per cent of businesses have suffered an IT breach

The overwhelming majority of large enterprises have suffered data breaches in one form or another over the past 12 months, according to a recent survey from Juniper Networks.
The study found that 90 per cent of the companies it polled reported falling victim to a breach, despite heavy spending on security protection. Nearly one quarter of the companies surveyed reported spending more than 25 per cent of their total IT budget on security.
"You have this environment where all these attacks are occurring," Karim Toubba, vice president of product marketing and strategy for Juniper's security business unit told V3.co.uk.
"They are investing a sizable amount of their budgets into security, yet these breaches are happening."Along with IT spending, the damages brought on by the breaches are becoming increasingly costly. Of those who experienced a breach, 41 per cent said that the attacks carried a cost of more than $500,000. Toubba noted that the attacks were wide-ranging in their scope and sophistication. He explained that on one hand, companies were being presented with highly sophisticated attack tools which looked to circumvent security protections.
On the other end of the spectrum, however, were less sophisticated and older attack techniques which prey on the security holes left open when companies fail to adopt best practices for securing their systems.
"You have many more sophisticated attacks, but you still see quite a bit of attacks that are circa 2005, or all the way to the late 1990s," said Toubba.
"You would think in today's modern world, people are protected against things like denial of service attacks, but we still see a lot of 'old world' attacks."The company partnered with research firm Ponemon Institute on the study. Researchers surveyed nearly 2,000 IT professionals and administrators from companies with more than 1,000 employees.

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