14 DAY TRIAL // Cyber-Ark Software has released its 6th annual cyber security survey entitled “Global Trust, Security and Passwords Survey,” a study based on interviews with 820 IT managers from North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
The figures from the report reveal that most attacks that target enterprises leverage privileged access points such as administrative accounts, backdoors present in applications, and default passwords. These usually allow cybercriminals to easily gain access to sensitive information.
64% of respondents believe that most cyberattacks have involved the exploitation of such access points.
Other numbers show that 71% of those questioned consider insiders to pose the biggest security threat. This is based on the fact that 45% admit to having access to information that’s not relevant to them.
Moreover, more than half state that they’re certain that competitors have gained access to their sensitive information and intellectual property.
Apparently, high-profile data breaches, such as the one that affected Global Payments, do have an impact on security strategies, since more than half of the IT managers said that their plans were redesigned after such incidents.
Unfortunately, even though they’re aware that privileged access points are a tempting target for hackers, organizations fail to properly monitor them.
Furthermore, many decision makers (72%) state that the current breach notification laws aren’t so efficient when it comes to curbing data loss.
“Whether it’s a malicious insider looking to steal information, or an external attacker looking to exploit privileged accounts to gain access to the network and sensitive information, it’s clear that privileged access points have emerged as the priority target of enterprise cyber-assaults,” said Udi Mokady, founder and CEO of Cyber-Ark.
“This pattern has been demonstrated in some of the most high profile attacks, including Global Payments, Utah, and even with the recent Flame virus. Everything that we’ve known about security is changing - it’s no longer acceptable to simply focus on the perimeter and hope to keep attackers out.”