40% of hackers can exfiltrate data in an hour

Four in 10 professional hackers say they can exfiltrate data in less than an hour, according to Nuix’s second annual Black Report.

The report — based on anonymous surveys with hackers, penetration testers and incident responders attending the Black Hat, Bsides and DEFCON hacker conferences in Las Vegas in July last year — found that a further 33% of respondents say they can exfiltrate data in less than five hours.

The wide majority of those surveyed say it takes less than 15 hours to bypass security systems, locate critical data and steal it.

The report also found that 93% of respondents said their targets don’t even detect attacks more than half of the time, and 22% report using the same attack techniques for a year or more before they stop working.

“The Black Report reveals a huge gap between perception and reality in cybersecurity — you might think you’re well protected but the people whose job it is to break in and steal your data think otherwise,” said Nuix’s head of services, security and partner integration, Chris Pogue.

“For example, most organisations invest heavily in perimeter defences such as firewalls and antivirus, and these are mandatory in many compliance regimes, but most of the hackers we surveyed found these countermeasures trivially easy to bypass. If hackers can steal your data within a day but you only find out it happened months later, you’re well on the way to becoming the next big news story.”

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/weerapat1003

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