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The average number of cyber attacks detected by companies in
mainland China and Hong Kong grew 969 percent between 2014 and
2016. The number of attacks averaged more than 7 a day for each
of the survey's 440 China-based respondents - around half of the
global average of 13.
However, the average number of attacks fell by 3 percent
globally over the last two years, and 30 percent since 2015, in
contrast to the rise in China.
China's rapid adoption of new consumer and industrial technology
for the 'Internet of Things (IoT)' era may be part of the
reason. PwC said such connected devices are the leading targets
of cyber-attacks.
"IoT devices in general have not paid attention to cyber
security," said Marin Ivezic, a partner on cyber security at PwC
in Hong Kong.
"In China and Hong Kong ... we have more adoption than anywhere
else in the world," he said, noting China was also one of the
biggest manufacturers of these items.
Chinese-made connected home devices such as webcams with
security loopholes that gave way to botnet malwares were blamed
by security researchers for a massive cyber attack in the US
last month that temporarily paralyzed major internet sites.
The Chinese companies surveyed had cut their cybersecurity
budget by 7.6 percent in 2016 compared with flat global
spending. Thirty four percent of them identified competitors as
a source of attacks, a rate higher than anywhere else in the
world.
The PwC survey does not track the country of origin of the
attacks, which Ivezic said is "almost impossible". The drop in
the global number of cyber attacks did not reflect a safer
environment, he said, but was rather the result of more
sophisticated cyber criminals who more selective in who they
targeted.
(Reporting by Sijia Jiang; Editing by Alexandra Hudson)
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