Mimecast has conducted a survey of 600 IT security managers from organisations in the South Africa, United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. The initial findings of that survey were released in 2016. The average company goes 229 days before realising it has been breached. By this time cybercriminals could have launched a variety of damaging attacks resulting in direct financial loss, reputational damage, and the theft of important or highly sensitive data like client records, trade secrets or credit card information.
By concentrating predominately on outside threats, organisations around the world struggle with the risk that comes from their own people, emphasising the need for organisations to implement employee awareness and education as well as creating a cyber resilience strategy.
Organisations around the world are turning to the threats from within when it comes to cybersecurity, with 45% saying they are ill-equipped to cope with the threat of malicious insiders and 90%, calling malicious insiders a major threat to the organisations’ security.
Mimecast’s research also uncovered that:
- 53% of IT security decision makers view malicious insiders as a moderate or high threat to their organisation
- One in seven IT security decision makers view malicious insiders as their number one threat
- Those who say they are very equipped on cybersecurity feel just as vulnerable to insider threats
People are being duped every day. The US FBI reported that losses from external threats like whaling or CEO fraud attacks alone grew by 270% from January to August 2015 with reported losses of $800 million in just six months. Mimecast’s research showed that in the first three months of 2016, 67% of organisations had seen an increase in attacks designed to extort fraudulent payments and 43% saw an increase in attacks specifically asking for confidential data like HR records or tax information.
Organisations are often their own worst enemy when it comes to effective cyber resilience planning. External email threats dominate as preferred attack techniques. But, focusing only on external threats is not enough. Too many organisations are ignoring an equally insidious threat from within, the malicious insider. Email phishing in its many forms has grown in popularity.
Here the attacker sends email to lots of people with a malicious web link to steal credentials for logins or a malware-laden attachment to infect a machine. Every day, we trust employees with sensitive information and powerful tools, but we do not give them the effective security education and advanced cloud security solutions that goes hand-in-hand with those responsibilities.
Some tips:
- Implement internal safeguards and data control to detect malicious insiders when they do strike
- Assign role-based permissions to administrators to better control access to key systems and limit insiders
- Offer employee security training programs to deter potential malicious insiders
- Nurture a culture of communication within teams to help employees watch out for each other
As a global email security vendor, with a significant user base in South Africa, Brandon Bekker at Mimecast explains the common threats that Africa faces along with rest of the world.
