Belief in security breaches

A survey conducted recently by Lieberman Software Corporation reveals that more than 70% of IT security professionals would not be willing to bet $100 of their own money that their organization will not suffer a data breach in the next six months.

Posted in Device Security Management Security + Compliance Storage + Servers

Nearly 250 IT security professionals took part in the survey at RSA Conference 2013, providing details about work attitudes and the way their organizations manage cyber security. Roughly half of respondents are employed in organizations with more than 1,000 people.

The study also reveals that a third of organizations do not have a policy that makes it compulsory to change default passwords when deploying new hardware, applications and network appliances on the corporate network.

Commenting on the research, Philip Lieberman, President and CEO of Lieberman Software, said: “These figures highlight the fact that many IT security professionals recognize that their organizations are woefully unprotected against cyber attacks. While vendors of conventional security products - like firewalls and anti-virus - are constantly updating their tools to reactively protect against the latest threats, hackers are looking for flaws and engineering new attacks to exploit them. The reality is that 100% protection is nearly impossible to achieve, but there are still best practices for securing access to critical systems and data that many organizations tend to ignore.”

“For example, this survey revealed the unfortunate fact that so many IT groups are still not changing default passwords when deploying new systems. This simply must be a standard practice in any size organization. Default privileged passwords are, in the truest sense, open backdoors into systems that are deployed on production networks. Most default passwords are publicly known and easily found online, meaning that anyone with malicious intent can use these default credentials as a foothold to gain anonymous access to systems and applications throughout the network.”

“IT departments that do not have a solution in place to automatically detect, flag and change default privileged passwords on newly deployed systems are neglecting a very dangerous security hole.”

89% of security leaders think traditional security approaches are failing in the face of modern threats

Research shows ‘game needs to be changed,’ with security innovation years behind that of the attackers, the board a decade behind security discussions and regulation needing more industry input.

Lack of automated patch management a remote security risk

73% of organizations lack automated patch management, and 62% experienced incidents involving exploitation of a vulnerability for which a patch was available but had not yet been deployed.

Dell Technologies and AWS collaborate

Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for AWS provides a fast, easy-to-deploy public cloud vault to help secure, isolate and recover data from a ransomware attack.

Costs, cyberattacks and compliance - cause for concern

Node4 has released its Mid-Market IT Priorities Report 2021. The independent report reveals that the UK’s Mid-Market IT Leadership expects to see a shortfall in IT spend in 2022. While 52% of IT decision-makers believe their 2021 budget met the ambitions of their team, there seems to be less certainty and confidence about future finances — 61% think their budget will need to increase in 2022, but only 13% expect it to.

Avast research finds growing security challenges for SMBs

Research from Avast has found that employees in almost a third (31%) of Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) in the UK are connecting to the corporate network using personal devices that do not have any security controls in place, according to IT Decision Makers (ITDMs) within SMBs.

Security and governance among top IT needs

This year, over half of MSPs or their end customers have been attacked by ransomware but only 53% offer backup services.

Palo Alto Networks shifts left with Prisma Cloud 3.0

Palo Alto Networks has introduced Prisma® Cloud 3.0, said to be the industry’s first integrated platform to shift security left—significantly improving organizations’ entire cloud security posture by reducing security risk at runtime.

Urgent need for new way to discuss business risk

Trend Micro has published new research revealing that 90% of IT decision makers claim their business would be willing to compromise on cybersecurity in favor of digital transformation, productivity, or other goals. Additionally, 82% have felt pressured to downplay the severity of cyber risks to their board.