Avecto has performed a study at the recent Infosecurity Europe conference

Jun 7, 2013 22:01 GMT  ·  By

According to a study performed by Avecto at Infosecurity Europe in London, most IT security professionals have named malware, rogue employees or unauthorized software as representing the greatest threats.

The numbers show that these elements have been named as being the most problematic by 80% of the 500 respondents.

More precisely, 41% of those surveyed named rogue employees as the biggest threat to their company. This isn’t surprising considering that 30% of them don’t have policies in place for managing administrator access.

31% of IT security professionals are most concerned about targeted attacks and malware. 8% of those questioned are concerned about the threats posed by unauthorized software.

“In today’s increasingly-complex threat landscape, organizations are quickly learning that employees don’t have to be malicious to put a company at risk. The most common threat comes from employees who download and install unauthorized software, without understanding the potential risks associated with their actions,” commented Mark Austin, co-founder and CEO of Avecto.

“The best protection against this unauthorized activity is addressing a major pain point – users with excessive privileges. By granting privileges to applications, instead of users, companies can empower users to perform their role and vastly increase the security posture of the endpoints,” Austin added.

“Users logging on with full administrator rights will continue to put organizations at real risk of infection, as the sophistication of malware and targeted attacks continues to evolve. Unfortunately, organizations are still allowing administrator rights to go unmanaged, whether knowingly or unwittingly,” he said

“This is a significant problem, particularly as the current crop of anti-malware software is repeatedly proving to be deficient in the fight against cybercrime.”

Organizations that want to address privilege management issues can turn to a dedicated solution, such as Avecto’s Privilege Guard.