They say that you should learn from your mistakes, an adage that seems to go out the window when dealing with cyber security given that 46% fail to change security strategy following an attack.
The shocking statistic is the latest in a long line of frankly humiliating findings that increasingly makes you lose any sympathy for those at the pointy end of the stick.
Albert Einstein said that, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results,” clearly a message that needs to be plastered on the walls of IT security professionals.
The CyberArk Global Advanced Threat Landscape Report 2018, which is where this figure comes from, found that almost half of IT security professionals rarely change their security strategy substantially, even after a cyber attack – clearly resulting in putting at risk sensitive data, infrastructure, and assets.
Rich Turner, Vice President EMEA, CyberArk, said: “When target organisations haven’t moved with the times, cyber attackers often have an easy time of it and are able to penetrate traditional perimeter defenses without undue effort. Companies must show greater urgency to change the game, which means treating the risk associated with cyber security in the same way as wider business risks such as competition and the economy.
“Understanding how changing service delivery models – like cloud and DevOps – affect the attack surface is a crucial component of cyber risk. Business leaders have a critical role to play in transforming the risk mindset and building cyber resilience across the enterprise.”
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Further findings saw that 89% believe that IT infrastructure and critical data are not fully protected unless privileged accounts, credentials, and secrets are secured. To compound this issue, the number of users who have local admin privileges on their endpoint devices rose from 62% in 2016 to 87% in 2018.
Unsurprisingly, the list of threats that most face are the standard issues, targeted phishing attacks (56%), insider threats (51%), ransomware or malware (48%), unsecured privileged accounts (42%), and unsecured data stored in the cloud (41%).
Yet again we are in the position of everyone being able to identify that there’s a lot of threats, but little effort being made to actually remedy it.
