IT professionals under pressure from email attacks

Email attacks are causing major problems for IT professionals, with over a third (38 percent) blaming them for increased stress at work.

A survey of 660 IT professionals by Barracuda Networks reveals that 38 percent also admit to worrying about email attacks outside of work hours and 16 percent have canceled personal plans due to email attacks.

These attacks cause problems for productivity too. Those in EMEA countries flag the most emails as suspicious, but 44 percent of respondents agree that less than 10 percent turn out to actually be fraudulent.

Among respondents 81 percent spend 30 minutes or more investigating each email attack, while 47 percent spend over an hour per attack. 39 percent of EMEA respondents report damage to their company's reputation over the past year, compared to the global average of 27 percent. The EMEA region is most likely to fall victim to spear phishing attacks too, 48 percent being victims in the past twelve months compared to a global average of 43 percent.

"It's clear email attack management has created a significant overhead for EMEA organisations," says Chris Ross, SVP international at Barracuda Networks, writing on the company's blog. "Without the correct automated incident response tools in place to alleviate the stress and complexity of email attacks, the manual investigation and resolution time can only be expected to rise."

You can get the full report on the Barracuda site.

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