Its Your People Who Contribute To Data Breaches
A survey conducted by ESET reveals that 42% of businesses are focusing on delivering compliance training as part of their cyber security protocol, while over 63% use passwords as a gate keeper of their systems. Yet human error is a major factor in many cyber breaches.
There is often a lack of team coherence regarding cyber security, despite the fact that every team member in a modern business will have access to and be using vulnerable systems on a regular basis.
Cyber security is something which too many businesses leave up to dedicated IT specialists, when in fact a lot of breaches could be avoided if a more integrative and business-wide approach to cyber security were adopted. The conversation about cyber security needs to be happening in the boardroom and teams across the organisation. For the human risk factor to be mitigated, both senior and middle management need to play a much larger role in both identifying vulnerabilities within their teams and securing cyber systems via an integrative human/machine approach.
Cyber-criminals are not constrained by the same restrictions which govern legitimate software developers and white-hat hackers. This enables cybercriminals to implement changes at an unprecedented speed, enabled by ever evolving technology including Artificial Intelligence.
For example, ransomware (software which takes control of systems and/or data and hold it to ransom) has recently been supplanted by more direct methods of skimming cash or stealing data to sell on.
This change happened even before white-hat developers had got to grips with ransomware. Time after time we’ve seen that the next ‘Big Thing’ in cybercrime goes live before we’ve even started getting to grips with the last Big Thing. So, while the trends mentioned above may be dominating at the time of writing, the MO of any cyber-criminal worth their salt can and will change in a number of unpredictable ways, and will do so extremely quickly. However, what is notable about the most successful cyberattacks is that they rely on a degree of human error and/or ignorance.
For example, cybercriminals are able to install phishing codes onto systems via Alexa because many people are unaware of the need to protect their smart devices as well as their desktop computers.
In a business context, there is often a lack of awareness about the need for a truly integrative and self-aware approach to cyber security, one which encompasses everyone and not just the ‘boffins’ in the IT department.
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