Understanding intent key to boosting security

Some 71% of Australian cybersecurity professionals believe that understanding employee behaviours and intent are of critical importance, but less than 30% believe they are very effective at doing so.

A global survey from Forcepoint found that among Australian respondents, found that 70% don’t believe they are very effective at understanding the behaviours of employees as they interact with business data, and an even higher proportion (84%) are not very effective at understanding intent.

Employee activity also dominates the list of the top four people-based risks to security, with only malware (37%) considered a higher risk than inadvertent human behaviour (26%), criminal employee activity (12%) and rogue employees (10%).

In addition, only 12% of respondents consider themselves very or extremely effective at recognising anomalous or suspicious actions inside a network, suggesting that businesses are still leaving themselves exposed to insider threats.

The survey also shows that 67% of Australian cybersecurity professionals agree that focusing more on human behaviour would help improve security and reduce costs, with no business disagreeing.

Changing employee behaviours are also causing headaches for cybersecurity professionals, with 38% stating that they are very or extremely concerned with the practice of employees using smartphones for both business and personal purposes, such as social media.

Only 3% of Australian businesses report having extremely good visibility into how employees are using critical business data across both company issued or approved devices and communications services.

Respondents ranked email as the greatest risk to their critical business data (44%) followed by social media, mobile devices and laptops.

Likewise the traditional model of siloed in-house IT infrastructure has well and truly changed. More than 60% of Australian businesses are now using a private cloud service for critical data, 26% have BYOD policies, 21% use a public cloud service and 29% use removable media.

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