Cybercrime and companies in Italy - statistics & facts
Cyber risks have increased consistently for Italian companies after the COVID-19 pandemic. In May 2022, the Italian government launched the country’s first National Cybersecurity Strategy, to better address the challenges of industrial and institutional digitalization. In 2022, there were 1,094 cyber incidents that had a national impact and were handled by the national-entrusted Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT).
Data breaches represent an additional threat to the online industry environments of the country. Between 2020 and 2023, the cost of a data breach in Italy was 3.86 million U.S. dollars, up from 3.74 million U.S. dollars in the previous year.
Common types of cyber attacks in Italy
In the first half of 2023, general cyber crime represented 84 percent of the attacks on Italian companies, while acts of hacktivism – which uses hacking to disrupt institutional or private companies to pursue political or social means, represented almost eight percent of the total. As of the beginning of 2023, phishing was the most common type of cyber attack Italian companies had to withstand, with a 96 percent encounter rate. Additionally, management and IT professionals in Italy noticed the rise of CEO frauds and business e-mail compromise cases, which at the beginning of 2023 was encountered by 40 percent of businesses.Ransomware encounters and data breaches
The number of Italian companies reporting having encountered cyberattacks experienced an increase, going from 27 percent in 2022 to 40 percent in 2023. The private sector was more strongly impacted than the public one, with merely 18 percent of the recorded cyber attacks in 2022 targeting Italian institutions. Within the private sector, 54 percent of the attacks on Italian companies targeted the service industry, while manufacturing accounted for 11 percent of the total attacks recorded in Italy during the second quarter of 2023.Data breaches represent an additional threat to the online industry environments of the country. Between 2020 and 2023, the cost of a data breach in Italy was 3.86 million U.S. dollars, up from 3.74 million U.S. dollars in the previous year.
