About one-third of targeted attempts to breach corporations'cyber defenses succeed, but three-quarters of executives remainunaccountably confident in their security strategies, Accenturereported Wednesday in a survey of 2,000 security officersrepresenting large enterprises worldwide.

The “alarmingly high” failure rate in defending against attacksis compounded by their “sheer volume,” Accenture said in thereport.

“On average, an organization will face more than a hundredfocused and targeted breach attempts every year, and respondentssay one in three of these will result in a successful securitybreach,” the report's authors write. “That's two to threeeffective attacks per month.”