Increase in remote working and COVID-19 related threats ‘creating perfect storm of security challenges for organizations’
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- Published: Wednesday, 08 April 2020 08:55
Check Point has announced findings from a new survey, conducted by Dimensional Research, examining the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on enterprise security. The findings show that the rapid changes to enterprise working practices, and broader concerns about the pandemic, are both being exploited by cyber criminals as they step up their attacks, generating a raft of new challenges for security professionals.
Key findings from the survey of 411 IT and security professionals globally are:
COVID-19 related attacks ramp up – 71 percent of security professionals reported an increase in security threats or attacks since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak. The leading threat cited was phishing attempts (cited by 55 percent or respondents), followed by malicious websites claiming to offer information or advice about the pandemic (32 percent), followed by increases in malware (28 percent) and ransomware (19 percent).
Challenges of managing remote working increase – 95 percent of respondents said they are facing added IT security challenges due to the spread of COVID-19. The three leading challenges were provision of secure remote access for employees (cited by 56 percent), the need for remote access scalable solutions (55 percent) and employees working from home were using shadow IT solutions - untested software, tools and services (47 percent).
Security concerns over the coming months – 61 percent of respondents were concerned about the security risks of having to make rapid changes to enable remote working, and 55 percent felt that remote access security needed improving. 49 percent are concerned about the need to scale-up endpoint security.
