Alarming statistics

Exonar have recently carried out research following a survey of 500 IT professionals. Their main findings show that 94% of IT professionals have experienced a data breach and 79% are worried that their company could be next. [1]

The threat posed by employee’s themselves appears to be the biggest danger to information security, with two fifths of respondents to the survey confirming that employee data breaches pose the biggest threat in the near future. Meanwhile the other 21% of respondents said external attacks from cybercriminals are the biggest risk and 20% believe it to be malware attacks.

The research also reveals that more than half (51%) of IT professionals say that most employee breaches occur via external email services such as Outlook, whilst 42% state that data breaches have happened through tools such as Dropbox. Surprisingly, only 6% of those surveyed had never experienced a data breach.

Despite these figures and the fact that data breaches are a significant feature in the working life for IT professionals, only 39% of organisations are taking active steps to gain visibility of their data. Danny Reeves, CEO of Exonar comments on how easy it is to be the source of a data breach and that the act can be done completely unintentionally, for example leaving high risk information unprotected in the wrong place.

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[1] https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2020/09/10/nine-out-of-ten-it-pros-have-experienced-a-data-breach/