The Digital Trust Center (DTC) enjoys working with partnerships, including public-private regional or sectoral cyber initiatives to make its target audience of 2.4 million businesses more resilient to cyber threats. The Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) annually monitors the ICT characteristics of businesses, such as Internet usage, cloud services and security measures. At the request of the DTC, CBS also monitors companies affiliated with DTC partnerships. The cyber resilience of this group of "DTC companies" is compared to a reference group with the same characteristics.
Three groups are compared. The first group consists of the entire population as measured within the annual CBS survey ICT usage companies. The second group is the reference group, which is a group of companies that, through reweighting in terms of industry and size, has a similar composition to the third group: the DTC companies.
When comparing the ICT security measures taken in 2024 compared to the previous year, it appears that all three groups have increased their ICT security measures in percentage terms. This upward trend can be seen in all three groups and in almost all categories of security measures.
The graph above shows how the DTC companies score compared to the reference group. A look at these results shows that the DTC group scores better on all ICT security measures than both the entire population and the reference group. For example, 99% of these companies use antivirus software, 76% have conducted a risk analysis and 82% have an ICT security monitoring system.
DTC companies also do more than the other groups to raise staff awareness about ICT security. Employees attend training more often. This applies to both voluntary and mandatory training.
A security incident occurred at 28% of the DTC companies. This is just slightly more than in the reference group, where the percentage is 25%. This is a difference of about 10 incidents. The percentage that experienced a ransomware attack is the same in all groups.
A causal relationship between taking security measures and being a DTC company cannot be demonstrated based on this data. It may be that companies that consciously implement more cyber measures are also more likely to join a collaborative effort.
