The Cisco 2017 Midyear Cybersecurity Report has found that there remains a large quantity of attacks and a forecast of "destruction of service" attacks that may render organizations helpless to recover lost data.

Destruction of service was a term coined to indicate when an attack is worse than a traditional one, which will cause businesses to be permanently crippled. The Internet of Things has brought with it the risk of more attacks through more modes, even causing the internet to be negatively affected by such attacks. The WannaCry and Nyeta attacks are examples of the damages that Cisco warns of.

Since November 2015, Cisco has been able to decrease the time-to-detection from 39 hours to 3.5 hours, approximately, meaning that attacks are more speedily recognized and able to be dealt with in a much more timely manner.

Cisco urges organizations to keep their systems up to date, to eliminate the risk of easy hacking, to limit siloed investments, to bring executive leadership into the know about the risks, rewards and other factors, to approach employee security training from a role-based perspective and to avoid simple blunders such as locking in passwords to be used for the next login.

"Security effectiveness starts with closing the obvious gaps and making security a business priority," Steve Martino, vice president and chief information security officer at Cisco, said.