Significant cyber incidents have tripled in two years in Canada, driven by technological, socioeconomic and geopolitical factors such as the war in Ukraine, according to research* from commercial insurer QBE.
Disruptive, globally significant and successful cyber attacks have increased from 10 in 2023 to 18 in 2024 and are expected to reach 32 by the end of the year, according to QBE’s latest Control Risks Report.
Businesses are acutely aware of this: four in five businesses (80%) feel cyber threats have increased in Canada over the past year, according to another piece of research** for QBE.
Cyber experience
The research highlights more than half of Canadian businesses (53%) have experienced a cyber event in the past 12 months. And nearly one in five (18%) of businesses experienced a cyber event which resulted in an interruption of one working day or more – 35% of businesses experienced a cyber event and the disruption lasted less than a working day.
Half of cyber attacks (51%) in Canada resulted in a loss of revenue. And 58% of businesses that experienced cyber attacks said that some, most or all of them were related to a supplier.
Kyle Gray, Technical Underwriter Team Lead, Cyber, commented: “Businesses are increasingly connected to one another. Strengthening their internal digital security is still very important. However, if they forget to look at their suppliers’ vulnerabilities, they will remain exposed. Risk management will need to look at their entire IT supply chain, with focus on their critical suppliers.”
Logically, 78% of businesses are concerned about the cyber threats they may face in the coming year (53% somewhat concerned and 25% very concerned). In that context, 28% of businesses anticipate their cyber security budget to increase beyond inflation (and 41% in line with inflation) over the next 12 months.
However, 25% of those surveyed do not have cyber insurance and 15% do not have an incident response plan to address a cyber event.
AI experiments
Almost all Canadian businesses (94%) are already using Artificial Intelligence (71%) or looking into it (23%).
In total, 87% of businesses think that AI will have a positive impact on Canada’s economy in the next 2 years and 86% of respondents believe AI will have a good impact on their own business within the same timeframe.
Among the businesses that are using or looking into AI, a majority are expecting enhanced efficiency and smaller costs:
* Control Risks collected and analysed recent data on cyber attacks.
** Opinium surveyed 400 IT decision makers within Canadian businesses employing 100 to 2000 people. The field work took place from 10 to 23 April 2025. Cyber events could include phishing attacks, malware infections, DoS attacks, data breaches, insider threats such as leaking of information, unauthorised access to systems or data, supply chain attacks, incidents due to software vulnerabilities, incidents due to flawed updates of software, social engineering attacks and so on.