Wednesday 29 April 2015

Cyber Budgets Rise with Increase in Cyber Threat

More than half of CIOs in the CIO 100 said their organisation had detected a cyber intrusion in the last 12 months, with a massive 95% responding security had risen up their management agenda - although not as many were seeing a corresponding increase in their budget to support this.
Some 56% of CIOs in the 2015 CIO 100 across industry - including local government, charities, retail, financial services, utilities, the NHS, media, universities, and manufacturing - responded they had detected a security breach in the last year, showing the cyber threat is a constant worry for CIOs whether you are supporting underprivileged children and aid workers worldwide, handling billions of pounds in financial assets, protecting intellectual property in the pharmaceutical industry, selling top-end boutique men's fashion or serving millions of healthcare patients in the UK.
And while 19 in 20 said cyber security had risen up their management agenda and 91% responded that they felt their organisation fully understood the threat posed by cyber intrusions, 73% also revealed cyber concerns had led to an increase in their security budget.
How do you create that threat awareness within in your company?
Creating that Security awareness and bridging the gap between Security and end users (including Board members) can be a key ingredient to growing the budget and essentially creating a common language that is understood and put into practice. 
Initiating a corporate IT security responsibility that is developed and continually built upon is a hard subject to tackle. At ZeroDayLab we are seeing more and more companies come to us for this kind of training and expertise as the increase in the use of social engineering as a key tactic for cybercriminals now puts staff at the centre of an effective IT security strategy.  Success now depends on a more holistic approach that doesn't uniquely centre on technology solutions.  Whilst they are a critical part of the strategy, hackers have become more personal in their approach, tailoring their targets to an organisation and its employees.  
From our perspective, as being seen by the CIO 100 report, Information Security must be a board level debate from the Top 100 down, whatever the size of a company, it is a target.  So the question is, how do you get C-suite buy-in when it involves them spending yet more money?


Thursday 16 April 2015

UK Cyber Attacks on the Rise...Again

Around five in six large organisations were subject to some form of cyber-attack in the past year and things look set to get worse, says the latest Internet Security Threat Report from Symantec.
The IT security firm said that this represented a 40 percent increase from the year before, with the UK the second most targeted nation worldwide and top in Europe.
Around two-in-three attacks were aimed at SMBs, which put not only themselves at risk but also their customers and partners.
The report said that cyber-criminal attacks are becoming more advanced and employing covert tactics such as infecting software updates.
Phishing attacks were also up on last year, increasing by eight percent on 2014. But cyber-criminals are getting more efficient sending 20 percent fewer emails to successfully reach their victims. The phishing emails incorporated drive-by downloads and other web-based exploits.
The report found that email remained the attack vector of choice for the cyber-criminal, but they also continued to experiment with new methods via mobile devices and social networks to reach more people with less effort.
Mike Langley, regional vice president at Palo Alto Networks told SC Magazine via email that the threat landscape is changing and over the last couple of years there has been a "dramatic change" in both attackers and the techniques they use.
"By some estimates cyber-crime is now a $1+ trillion industry. In 2014, 783 data breaches resulted in the loss of more than 85 million records, and 2015 numbers are already tracking worse," he said. "Hackers are carrying out sophisticated and multi-faceted attacks which are costing businesses millions of dollars in lost revenue as they compromise their customer data."
What IT Security issues cause you the most disruption?