90 Percent of the IT Enterprises Consider Malicious Insiders as the Major Threat: A Mimecast Report

WATERTOWN, MA: Mimecast, a data security provider, reveals a new data of cyber threat that the enterprises would face with malicious insiders. Around 45 percent of the organisations believe they are not ready to cop up with the threats caused by the malicious insiders. The survey report of 600 IT security managers from organizations across United States, United Kingdom, South Africa and Australia further found that around 90 percent of the enterprises are considering malicious insiders as the major threat to the organisations.

A report from “Business Email Threat” found that 65 percent of the IT enterprises consider the email security system inappropriate to handle the cyber security threat which gives the malicious insider a major boost to do the cyber crime.

Challenges faced by the IT organisation

The IT security decision makers consider malicious insider as one of the major threat to the organisation. One in seven of them think it as the number one threat. The organisations who believe to be well equipped with security solutions also mark the risk of malicious insider.

The organisations mainly focussing on outside threats remain unaware about the security problems that could arise within the company. The report also reveals that around half of the enterprises felt exposed to malicious insider attacks. The organisations understand the need to implement employee awareness program and education to create a cyber resilience strategy.   

The findings suggest organisations to provide better role based permissions to its employees to minimise the threats caused by the malicious insiders to the key systems. Internal safeguards and data exfiltration control can be installed to detect the threat of malicious insiders and limit their ability to send confidential data outside the network. A culture of communication within the team can be developed to find the ones who can cause harm to the organisation. The leadership training program can ensure open communication and awareness. 

“Organizations of all sizes struggle with the risks that are posed by employees being targeted by adversaries to launch and execute attacks to gain access to data or funds” says Peter Bauer, CEO, Mimecast. “Every day, we trust employees with sensitive information and powerful tools, but we don’t give them the effective security education and advanced cloud security solutions that goes hand-in-hand with those responsibilities. As a community we must work together to enact better business processes. This is in part why we launched the Cyber Resilience Coalition, bringing together leading security, data protection and business continuity vendors to help strengthen organizations’ total cyber resilience strategy.