A new report reveals that Ireland ranked 46th globally among countries where customers were most frequently impacted by cyber attacks, while it was ranked 20th in Europe.
The report from Microsoft, which covers the first half of of 2025, also shows that Ireland accounted for about 1.2% of its customers impacted by cyber attacks in Europe.
Despite the urgent need for stronger cyber defences, the Microsoft Ireland Work Trend Index 2025 reveals that cybersecurity training remains inconsistent across the Irish workforce.
30% of Irish workers said they received no cybersecurity training in the past year, which Microsoft said means that due to increasingly sophisticated attacks, the risk of being a victim of a cyber attack is real and rising.
It said this "vulnerability" is most pronounced among SMEs - which form the backbone of Ireland's economy - with just 19% of employees in smaller businesses (2 to 49 employees) getting regular training, compared to 48% in larger organisations.
It also noted that 71% of 25-34 year-olds have received training in the last 12 months, compared with 58% of 55-64 year-olds.
"These disparities underscore the urgent need for continuous, organisation-wide skilling to close Ireland's cyber defence gap," it added.
Microsoft said that on a global level, extortion and ransomware drove 52% of cyberattacks while attacks focused solely on espionage made up just 4%.
Microsoft said it processes more than 100 trillion signals every day and blocks about 4.5 million new malware attempts. It also analyses 38 million identity risk detections and screens 5 billion emails for malware and phishing.
It said that advances in automation and readily available off-the-shelf tools have enabled cybercriminals - even those with limited technical expertise - to expand their operations significantly.
"The use of AI has further added to this trend with cybercriminals accelerating malware development and creating more realistic synthetic content, enhancing the efficiency of activities such as phishing and ransomware attacks," the tech company said.
"As a result, opportunistic malicious actors now target everyone - big or small - making cybercrime a universal, ever-present threat that spills into our daily lives," it added.
