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EDITOR’S QUESTION
DANIEL LOTTER,
HEAD OF INNOVATION
AT ITEC SOUTH AFRICA
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A
sk any South African company what
their major headaches are right
now, and chances are that security
will be near the top of the list.
Not just the burglar bars and CCTV type
of security, either. As cybercrime becomes
more sophisticated by the day, businesses
are struggling to secure their data and
company infrastructures.
The statistics from Mimecast’s report are
frankly frightening. Cybercrime is on the rise,
and cybercriminals are constantly evolving
their techniques to steal information and
disrupt businesses.
Perhaps the most concerning statistic is
that people are still the weakest link in any
corporate IT security system. Even in 2019,
people are being tricked into clicking on
fake links and email attachments, with dire
consequences for their companies.
Mimecast’s report found that impersonation
attacks increased almost 70% compared
to the previous year – and three-quarters
of the affected companies experienced a
direct loss, whether loss of customers (28%),
financial loss (29%) or data loss (40%).
Seems the old tricks still work the best
for criminals. Ransomware, phishing and
social engineering are all on the rise, with
phishing attacks the most prominent type of
cyberattack. A total of 94% of Mimecast’s
respondents experienced phishing and spear
phishing attacks in the previous 12 months,
and 55% saw an increase in phishing
attacks over the same period.
To make things worse, nation state
politics have entered the picture and are
complicating things even further. A year ago,
www.intelligentcio.com
few people would have thought that going
with a specific platform would potentially
compromise their security. Today, you don’t
even know if you can trust your hardware
vendor anymore. Step two is to lose the siloes. Many businesses
that we see still adopt a patchwork approach,
with different applications from different
suppliers tacked together loosely to try and
combat different threats.
So how do businesses deal with an
increasingly diverse threat landscape? Step
one is to focus on your people. Until every
person in a company understands how and
why they have to protect the corporate IT
assets, systems and data, businesses will
remain vulnerable to attack. You need to
create a culture of security with a multi-
layered, holistic defence system that covers
people, policies and procedures. A firewall from one supplier, an anti-virus
from another. This isn’t just bad security. It’s
bad business.
And step three is to hire an expert to help
you keep IT security costs down through a
holistic, intelligent approach to security. This
frees you up to focus on your core business,
while reducing business disruptions and even
taking advantage of new opportunities.
INTELLIGENTCIO
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