SINGAPORE (May 6): Despite improvements to combating cybercrime and threats, IT security professionals are still struggling to fully protect their organisation against breaches with 61% claiming to have experienced a data breach at their current workplace.
This is part of the findings from McAfee’s latest report titled Grand Theft Data II – The Drivers and Shifting State of Data Breaches.
Data breaches are becoming more serious as cybercriminals continue to target intellectual property. This puts the company’s reputation at risk and increases financial liability. In Singapore, 66% of all breaches have required public disclosure, which in turn has affected financial results.
Despite these persistent cyber threats and breaches, more than half (53%) of local companies still lack proactive strategies to enable threat hunting.
According to the report, data thieves these day are becoming savvier, as data is now being stolen by a wide range of methods, with no single technique dominating the industry. The current top vectors used to steal data are database leaks, cloud applications and removable USB drives.
Meanwhile, personally identifiable information (PII) and intellectual property (IP) are now tied as the data categories with the highest potential impact to 43% of respondents.
In Europe, PII is a larger concern, following the recent enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). While IP theft is a greater concern to countries in the Asia-Pacific.
It was found that companies experience delayed detection and remediation actions, due to the security technology team in the company operating in isolation. About 81% of IT security professionals have said that their companies have separate policies or management consoles for cloud access security broker (CASB) and data loss prevention (DLP).
In addition, more than half of the IT professionals think that senior and c-level executives should lose their jobs if a data breach is serious enough, yet 61% also state that the c-level executives they work with expect more lenient security policies for themselves.
Nonetheless, IT professionals have been taking action. Almost two-thirds have purchased additional DLP, CASB and endpoint detection solutions over the last 12 months. The respondents believe that between 65% and 80% of breaches experienced would have likely been prevented if one or more of these systems had been installed.
Overall, the study has shown that companies need a cybersecurity strategy that includes implementing integrated security solutions combined with employee training and an overall culture of security throughout the organisation to reduce future breaches.
Candace Worley, vice president and chief technical strategist at McAfee says, “Organisations need to augment security measures by implementing a culture of security and emphasising that all employees are part of an organisation’s security posture, not just the IT team. To stay ahead of threats, it is critical companies provide a holistic approach to improving security process by not only utilising an integrated security solution but also practicing good security hygiene.”
