The Cyber Threat Has Scaled Up
In France, 40% of organizations have suffered at least one successful cyberattack in the past year, according to the CESIN barometer published in early 2026. The national agency, ANSSI, processed more than 4,386 security events in 2024, with 144 ransomware compromises brought to its attention during the year.
This pressure spares no type of organization. In 2023, very small businesses, small and medium-sized enterprises, and mid-sized companies already accounted for 34% of reported attacks, ahead of local authorities (24%) and healthcare facilities (10%). The notion that only large corporations are targeted is a vestige: the multiplication of incidents now touches the entire economic fabric, precisely because the least mature structures provide the easiest entry points.
The dominant modus operandi remains ransomware, which encrypts the victim’s data before demanding payment. It is increasingly accompanied by double extortion: attackers exfiltrate data and threaten to publish it, depriving backups of their protective effect.
This industrialization is visible on a global scale as well. The consultancy Cybersecurity Ventures estimated the annual cost of damages tied to ransomware in the tens of billions of dollars, and the Verizon DBIR 2025 report confirms that ransomware is involved in roughly 44% of analyzed breaches. In other words, it is no longer a marginal risk but the reference scenario that every organization must prepare for.
A Cost That Extends Far Beyond the Ransom
The expense of an incident does not stop at the demanded amount. The IBM Cost of a Data Breach 2025 report puts the global average cost of a data breach at $4.44 million, down 9% year over year thanks to faster detection. The average cost of an incident tied to extortion or ransomware remains high, at $5.08 million.
On top of these direct costs come indirect costs that are often underestimated: production interruptions, delayed deliveries, loss of customers, and reputational damage. In France, 61% of affected companies report tangible business consequences. The IBM report also notes that most organizations take more than 100 days to recover fully after a breach.
The human factor is not spared: according to the Hiscox Cyber Readiness Report 2025, 32% of employees at victim companies report burnout, and IT team turnover rises in the six to twelve months after a major incident. The cyberattack thus becomes a global organizational risk, not merely a technical line item in the budget.
There is also an effect cascading through insurance and contracts. Cyber insurers are tightening terms and now require minimum measures—MFA, backups, an incident response plan—for coverage or indemnification. An organization that is not adequately protected can be refused coverage or see premiums soar, turning security into a condition of insurability for the business.
Why Cybersecurity Is Now a Strategic Priority
Three factors shift the topic from a technical concern to a strategic imperative. First, the regulatory pressure: the European directive NIS2, the DORA regulation for the financial sector, and the GDPR impose security and notification obligations, with non-compliance exposing organizations to penalties and executives to liability.
Second, the industrialization of the threat. Criminal groups operate like businesses, with ransomware-as-a-service models and a growing use of generative AI to craft convincing phishing messages. Phishing has, in fact, re-emerged as the primary initial attack vector in 2025 according to IBM, ahead of credential theft.
Third, the digital dependence: as business activity increasingly hinges on cloud services, data, and applications, any IT outage translates directly into operations stoppage. Security is no longer a protection cost but a condition for operational continuity.
This shift has concrete organizational consequences: the emergence of the CISO (chief information security officer) as the direct point of contact for the executive committee, and the inclusion of cyber risk in the risk map of major corporate risks, on par with financial or legal risks. In the most mature groups, the board of directors itself engages with the topic.
Where to Start: Turning the Assessment into a Roadmap
Making cybersecurity a priority does not mean securing everything at once; it means prioritizing by risk. A few guiding principles structure an initial roadmap:
- Map the attack surface: inventory the systems, access points, and data that are truly critical to the business.
- Activate high-leverage measures: multifactor authentication (MFA), tested offline backups, and regular software updates.
- Raise awareness among teams: humans remain a major vector, so phishing training is a high-ROI investment.
- Prepare the response: have an incident plan and detection capabilities (EDR, and even a SOC) to shorten the detection time, the main cost driver.
The question is no longer whether an organization will be targeted, but when and with what capacity to respond. Putting cybersecurity on the board’s agenda, assigning it a sustainable budget, and making it a management criterion: this is the first hallmark of a cyber maturity that distinguishes resilient companies from the rest.
Concretely, three simple indicators help a leader assess readiness without deep technical expertise: does the company maintain a tested backup whose restoration has been recently verified; is multifactor authentication implemented across sensitive access points; is there an incident response plan that everyone knows how to trigger in case of incident? A negative answer to any one of these questions flags a major vulnerability, regardless of budgets spent elsewhere.
Making cybersecurity a strategic priority is not about achieving perfect protection—an illusion—but about building a durable capacity to anticipate, detect, and recover. Companies that embrace this shift turn a constraint into a competitive advantage: they reassure customers, secure their value chain, and preserve business continuity in an environment where the threat will not recede.
This content is published by Mentioned
