74% CEOs globally worried about their firms' ability to avert cyberattacks: Report

New Delhi: About 74 per cent of CEOs globally are concerned about their organisations’ ability to avert or minimise damage to the business from a cyberattack, even though 96 per cent of CEOs believecybersecurity is vital to organisational growth and stability, a new report revealed on Friday.

According to the global IT services firm Accenture, about 60 per cent of CEOs said that their organisations don’t incorporate cybersecurity into business strategies, services or products from the outset, and more than 44 per cent believe cybersecurity requires episodic intervention rather than ongoing attention.

“The acceleration of generative AI makes it even more essential for organisations to take measures to ensure the security of their data and digital assets,” said Paolo Dal Cin, global lead of Accenture Security.

"Integrating cybersecurity risk into an enterprise risk management framework is the key to ensuring better security, regulatory compliance, business protection and customer trust," he added.

The report surveyed nearly 1,000 CEOs from large organisations globally.

Over half (54 per cent) of CEOs believe that the cost of implementing cybersecurity is higher than the cost of suffering a cyberattack despite history showing otherwise, the report said.

In addition, despite 90 per cent of CEOs saying they consider cybersecurity a differentiating factor for their products or services to help them build trust among customers, only 15 per cent have dedicated board meetings for discussing cybersecurity issues.

The report also suggested that generative AI has the potential to offer a higher level of advanced security threats, posing new problems that even best-practice cyber defences may not be able to fully handle.

About 64 per cent of CEOs said that cybercriminals could use generative AI to create sophisticated and hard-to-detect cyberattacks, such as phishing scams, social engineering attacks and automated hacks.

“The constantly evolving and never-ending threat landscape is creating a wide gap between CEOs’ increasing awareness of the business impact of cyberattacks and their lack of confidence to mitigate them,” said Valerie Abend, global cybersecurity strategy lead at Accenture Security.