Cyber risks increased by workers taking summer vacations

As workers take time off for summer holidays it means greater risk that personal devices and public Wi-Fi will be used to access sensitive corporate data.

Vulnerability management specialist Hackuity warns that this is a time when organizations are at their most vulnerable and cybercriminals are well aware of the fact.

"Every business in is becoming a technology business, is becoming a tech company, because everything gets digitized and there's no way stopping it. And that's great for the business, creates modularity, etc," says Pierre Samson, CRO at Hackuity. “But at the same time, that's great, and a match made in heaven for hackers because they have an increased attack surface."

In order to defend themselves businesses need to ensure they have appropriate threat detection in place. Security teams also need to have clear visibility into vulnerabilities across the organization. Context is key too, with security teams also likely to be stretched by the holidays it’s important to focus on the most serious threats.

Samson sees a role for automation to play a part. "AI is a threat because you can also automate the attacker side, but also gives you capabilities to define roles, to triage. It can makes an analysis to correlate those oddities with the exploits that are available on your assets inventory. The second automation is in the process, the way you integrate the technology within your own process and technology stack can save a lot of costs and so on. You need to build a single pane of glass for integration with your technology stack to provide context in an automated manner from the technology but also within and across teams."

As always the human is the weakest link in the chain and we're more likely to take shortcuts that increase the risk to the organization while we're in a relaxed holiday mood.

"For security practitioner I think the tension is really between what you control and what you can't control, you can't control the threat level you can only control your actions. And as the threat level is very high and the number of risk and pitfalls are high and increasing, this can be quite stressful. The only way you can do it is to anticipate, some organizations are really putting a lot of effort and increasing their resources and that's for good organization. I think the level of tension is on lots of the employees and sometimes the risk level and awareness at the top of the organization is not yet what it needs to be," Samson concludes.

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