Insider threats are believed by more than half of IT professionals (51 percent) to be one of the greatest security threats facing their organisation, according to CyberArk’s 2018 Global Advanced Threat Landscape Report.
Yet despite this, the report also found that enterprises were giving ever more employees local administrative privileges.
In particular, the proportion of employees granted local administrative privileges on their work devices had jumped from 62 percent in 2016 to 87 percent in 2018, a 62 percent increase in the last five years.
Research from Accenture and the Ponemon Institute meanwhile found that the average cost of cybercrime globally in 2017 was $11.8 million (£8.9 million), up 23 percent from 2016’s figure of $9.5 million (£7.2 million).
The Outsiders are In
More than half of business and IT respondents (51 percent) said they were aware of organisations giving third-party vendor access to their networks.
Twelve percent don’t secure their third-party vendor activity on an organisation’s network, with 23 percent not even monitoring their activity despite the General Protection Data Regulation (GDPR) being introduced in May 2018 in the European Union.
David Higgins, Director of Customer Development, EMEA at CyberArk commented: “Ignoring the power of privileged accounts and credentials could invite hackers to access critical enterprise assets and force executives to give up their knowledge, and even power, to an unwanted intruder.
He added: “As always, prevention is better than cure, and if organisations understand how they could be compromised in advance, they can secure business critical accounts and intellectual property more quickly in the event of an attack.”
