Patch management, network segmentation, and data backups can reduce the likelihood and financial impact of widespread malware attacks by 50% to 80% when effectively implemented, according to a joint study by CyberCube and Munich Re.

The two firms have published key findings from a study on severe cyber accumulation events and how effective mitigation measures can improve organisational resilience to systemic events.

The survey gathered insights from 93 seasoned cybersecurity professionals.

Most respondents believe a severe malware event could infect a quarter of all systems globally, though only 15% of those may be fully compromised. Experts do not anticipate a scenario in which more than half of global systems are completely compromised.

The study identified patch management, network segmentation, and data backups as the most effective mitigations against widespread malware attacks.

On cloud risk, experts expect broad cloud outages to last from several hours to days, with outages beyond 72 hours considered unlikely but not impossible.

Findings show that most industries have at least a medium level of dependency on cloud services, with business-critical operations becoming increasingly reliant on them. This reliance generally decreases as company size increases.

Respondents estimated that a one-day outage of their most critical Cloud Service Provider (CSP) could result in financial losses of around 1% of annual revenue. The impact varies depending on company size, sector, and contingency planning.

The most effective mitigation against cloud outages is establishing a multi-region architecture with the CSPs used for critical applications. The study noted that having multiple CSPs was not found to be effective; the option to transfer service from one CSP to another during an outage was seen as unfeasible.

Experts also noted that emerging technologies are influencing the threat landscape at roughly the same pace they are being adopted into cybersecurity practices.

In the near term, Industrial and Consumer IoT devices are seen as the greatest concern. Large Language Models (LLMs) are already having an impact, while Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is expected to become a greater issue in five or more years.

Jon Laux, Vice President of Analytics at CyberCube, said, “By sharing the findings of our study on systemic cyber risks, we aim to provide a more nuanced view of how systemic cyber events might unfold and the factors that drive wide variation in risk exposure across firms.”

Stephan Brunner, Senior Cyber Actuary at Munich Re, added, “Our ambition is to improve the understanding of possible extreme malware and cloud events alongside the effectiveness of mitigation measures by sharing the insights of our study. In collaboration, Munich Re aims to further strengthen expertise on systemic cyber risks and advance cyber accumulation modelling.”

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