By concentrating predominately on perimeter defense and outside threats, organizations around the world struggle with the risk that comes from their own people, emphasizing the need for organizations to implement employee awareness and education as well as creating a cyber resilience strategy that includes both technology- and human-based defenses. This is evident especially considering this study revealed that nearly half of the organizations polled felt exposed to malicious insider attacks.
Mimecast’s research also uncovered that:
- Over half (53 percent) of IT security decision makers view malicious insiders as a moderate or high threat to their organization.
- One in seven IT security decision makers view malicious insiders as their number one threat.
- Those who say they’re very equipped on cybersecurity feel virtually just as vulnerable to insider threats as those who believe they aren’t equipped at all (16 percent vs. 17 percent), indicating that the risk of malicious insiders trumps perceptions of security confidence.
“Organizations of all sizes struggle with the risks that are posed by employees being targeted by adversaries to launch and execute attacks to gain access to data or funds,” said Brandon Bekker, managing director at Mimecast MEA. “Every day, we trust employees with sensitive information and powerful tools, but we don’t give them the effective security education and advanced cloud security solutions that goes hand-in-hand with those responsibilities. As a community we must work together to enact better business processes. This is in part why we launched the Cyber Resilience Coalition, bringing together leading security, data protection and business continuity vendors to help strengthen organizations’ total cyber resilience strategy.
“Another issue we can work together to control is rogue employees who use file-sharing or cloud storage services to steal valuable corporate data – also known as malicious insiders. IT managers have, for too long, not paid due attention to this threat. We must re-evaluate unrestricted access to these services and ensure that other protections are put in place quickly.”
