Security professionals lack visibility into top threats

According to a new report, 89 percent of security professionals are most concerned about phishing, web and ransomware attacks, but only 48 percent confirm that they have continuous visibility into these risk areas.

The 2020 Cybersecurity 360 Report from Balbix also shows 64 percent of organizations are only, at best, somewhat confident in their security posture, and that the lack of visibility into security is the primary concern for organizations.

Specifically, 46 percent find it hard to tell which vulnerabilities are real threats compared to ones that will never be exploited. Limited visibility of the overall attack surface (37 percent), and the burden of being inundated with far too many alerts to act upon (25 percent) are found as additional significant concerns.

"The findings of our report make it abundantly clear that security professionals remain inundated with the challenge of maintaining comprehensive visibility over their complex attack surface while also combatting the evolving threat landscape," says Vinay Sridhara, CTO of Balbix. "In cybersecurity, risk trends can change overnight and it clear from the survey results that infosec professionals are struggling to assess, quantify, and prioritize the most important risks to their organizations."

The second biggest security threat faced by organizations, after phishing, web and ransomware attacks, is unpatched systems (53 percent), misconfigurations (47 percent) follows as the third main risk driver. Visibility into these threats is somewhat better, with 68 percent listing unpatched systems as the top area that they have continuous visibility into, followed by identity and access management (59 percent) and phishing, web and ransomware (48 percent).

Privileged accounts are an issue too, with 80 percent of organizations providing more access privileges than are necessary for users to do their jobs, unnecessarily adding risk to their organizations.

You can get the full report from the Balbix site.

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