Email is biggest security risk, old devices aren’t getting patched, and local cyber ‘incidents’
51% of organisations surveyed by Mimecast have suffered a ransomware attack, meanwhile NTT says ageing devices are causing network vulnerabilities, and two local companies have been struck by ‘cyber incidents’.
By: Asha Barbaschow | ZDnet.
Email continues to be the most popular attack vector, with a report from Mimecast noting that just over half of those it monitors have experienced a ransomware attack in the past 12 months.
In the State of Email Security 2020 report, Mimecast summarised the results of a global survey of 1,025 IT decision makers along with the information it gathered from screening more than 1 billion emails a day.
It said 51% have been impacted by ransomware in the past 12 months, 31% have experienced data loss due to lack of cyber resilience preparedness, 60% experienced an increase in impersonation fraud in the last year, 82% have experienced downtime from an attack, 77% believe weak passwords pose a risk of a serious security mistake, 58% saw phishing attacks increase, and 60% of respondents’ organisations were hit by an attack spread from an infected user to other employees.
“After years of frightening narratives and countless examples, the data points to a broad understanding of the potential risk for emailborne attacks — in other words, sophisticated attacks that arrive inside your environment via the email perimeter,” Mimecast wrote.
When it comes to phishing more generally, 72% of respondents stated it remained flat or increased in the last 12 months at their organisations, a jump from 69% in 2019.
With organisations spending big on cloud, and not so much on keeping older on-premises kit up to date, there has been an increase in obsolete and unpatched network devices that contain software vulnerabilities, which NTT said introduces risk and exposes organisations to information security threats.
The remarks were made in a report from the global giant that was based on more than 1,000 clients, covering over 800,000 network devices in five regions, across multiple industry sectors.
In the report, NTT found 46.3% of organisations’ network assets were ageing or obsolete. It said obsolete devices had, on average, twice as many vulnerabilities per device when compared with ageing and current ones, at 42.2 security advisories per device.
