Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 16 | Page 25

INFOGRAPHIC Matthew Gardiner, Cybersecurity Strategist at Mimecast, said emails ranging from opportunistic spam, targeted impersonation attacks and unknown malware are getting through incumbent email security systems Mimecast recently conducted global research with Vanson Bourne on the state of organisations’ cybersecurity, what attacks they’ve seen increase and their level of confidence to thwart these evolving attacks. The findings were based on responses from 800 IT decision makers and c-level executives. Not surprisingly, and consistent with the results of the Mimecast ESRA report, organisations are forecasting a challenging future, with nearly 60% of respondents having said their organisation is likely to suffer a negative business impact because of an email-borne attack in 2018. Matthew Gardiner, Cybersecurity Strategist at Mimecast, said: “Mimecast’s ESRA is aiming to establish a standard of transparency that raises the bar for all security vendors helping organisations pinpoint weaknesses in their defences. “Emails ranging from opportunistic spam, targeted impersonation attacks and www.intelligentcio.com unknown malware are getting through incumbent email security systems. “The security system of one primary cloud email platform missed 76.6% of the aggregate impersonation attacks while another global security vendor missed the 83.4% of the ‘known’ malware attachments.” Also in line with the ESRA results, despite efforts, email-borne attacks are on the rise. The clear majority of Vanson Bourne respondents have seen untargeted phishing attacks (94%) or targeted spear-phishing attacks (92%) with malicious links in the past 12 months, with the volume of both attacks increasing 56% over the last year. Most respondents also reported seeing email-based impersonation attacks asking either to initiate wire transfers (87%) or for confidential data (85%) over the last year. n INTELLIGENTCIO 25