Humans Still the Weak Link in the Security Chain
A new report by Verizon continues to confirm that the human is the weakest link in any network security chain.
The Verizon Enterprise 2017 Data Breach Digest contains numerous accounts of real-life stories of data breaches, corporate theft, million-dollar scams and emergency responses to contain and remedy the situations.
The document presents some key metrics on the frequency of different attack types by industry and objective before diving into stories surrounding four different types of key vulnerability:
- The Human Element
- Conduit Devices
- Configuration Exploitation
- Malicious Software
One key takeaway is this: it’s surprising how many basic technologies could counter the bulk of the nefarious activity in the stories. From marking email received from external domains as [External] so that it’s harder to fool accounts staff, to requiring two-factor authentication on web-accessible mail accounts, user awareness training and DNS checking prior to allowing connections – all to harden the human link in the chain against deception.
These are the kinds of Managed Service activity that we conduct every day for our clients.
For an eye-opening account of what’s really happening behind the scenes, and some fantastic tips on data security you can implement right now, read it here.
