KnowBe4 has released the results of new survey-based research, ‘What Keeps You Up at Night – The 2019 Report’. The report looks at over 350 organizations globally and reveals their security weaknesses and concerns. On average, 81 percent of organizations had some degree of concern around security issues.
Cyber crime continues to evolve and become more sophisticated. AI and machine learning are being leveraged by many criminal organizations to help them better understand how to improve their attacks and they are now targeting specific industry verticals, organizations and individuals. Increases in the frequency of ransomware, phishing and crypto jacking attacks were experienced by businesses of nearly every size, vertical and locale.
When it came to attack vectors, data breaches were the primary concern, with credential compromise coming in as a close second. Phishing and ransomware ranked next, demonstrating that organizations are still not completely prepared to defend themselves against these relatively old attack vectors.
Other key findings from the report include:
- 92 of organizations rank users as their primary security concern. And at the same time, security awareness training along with phishing testing topped the list of security initiatives that organizations need to implement.
- Organizations today have a large number of attack vectors to prevent, monitor for, detect, alert and remediate; in terms of attacks, 95 percent of organizations are most concerned with data breaches.
- Ensuring security is in place to meet GDPR requirements is still a challenge for 64 percent of organizations, despite the regulation details being out for quite some time.
- Attackers’ utilization of compromised credentials is such a common tactic, 93 percent of organizations are aware of the problem, but still have lots of work to do to stop it.
- When it comes to resources, 75 percent of organizations do not have an adequate budget.
