79% senior security professionals state cybersecurity has taken backseat

Hyderabad: With hybrid work culture becoming the norm and digitization taking over businesses, many organisations seem to be putting cybersecurity on the backburner. Reiterating this view, a report by CyberArk revealed that almost 79 per cent of senior security professionals state that cybersecurity has taken a back seat in the last year in favour of […]

Hyderabad: With hybrid work culture becoming the norm and digitization taking over businesses, many organisations seem to be putting cybersecurity on the backburner. Reiterating this view, a report by CyberArk revealed that almost 79 per cent of senior security professionals state that cybersecurity has taken a back seat in the last year in favour of accelerating other digital business initiatives.

The CyberArk 2022 Identity Security Threat Landscape Report identifies how the rise of human and machine identities – often running into the hundreds of thousands per organization – has driven a buildup of identity-related cybersecurity “debt”, exposing organizations to greater cybersecurity risk.

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The report says that every major IT or digital initiative results in increasing interactions between people, applications and processes, creating large numbers of digital identities. If these digital identities go unmanaged and unsecured, they can represent significant cybersecurity risk. Over 70 per cent of organisations have experienced ransomware attack in the past year with 62 per cent not doing anything to secure their software supply chain and 64 per cent admitting to a compromise of a software supplier would mean an attack on their organisations could not be stopped.

79 per cent agree that their organization prioritized maintaining business operations over ensuring robust cyber security in the last 12 months. Less than half have Identity Security controls in place for their business-critical applications.

CyberArk founder, chairman and CEO Udi Mokady said, “The past few years have seen spending on digital transformation projects skyrocket to meet the demands of changed customer and workforce requirements. The combination of an expanding attack surface, rising numbers of identities, and behind-the-curve investment in cybersecurity is exposing organizations to even greater risk, which is already elevated by ransomware threats and vulnerabilities across the software supply chain.

69% of non-humans or bots have access to sensitive data and assets

The average staff member has more than 30 digital identities

Machine identities now outweigh human identities by a factor of 45x on average

87% store secrets in multiple places across DevOps environments

80% say developers typically have more privileges than necessary for their roles