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Threat Landscape
One of the major news channels of South Africa suffered massive data breach compromising data of 60 million users (mostly South African citizens) during March 2017. This is considered to be the largest data breach incident in the history of South Africa.
Once the hacking news spread like wildfire among the cyber security experts, most of them believed it to be a work of some wily cyber crook. However, later on, it was found that the hacker didn’t require any effort to access the crucial information. Personal Information leaked due to easily accessible Web server.
Apart from this incident, the overall breaches in South Africa in 2018 increased by 4.5 million. Comparing to the breaches in 2017, this is a sharp increase by 133%. In this critical juncture, ARCON, being a thought leader in the Information Security domain, took an initiative to understand the level of IT security preparedness in Africa region.
Hence, ARCON conducted an exclusive survey with several hundreds of organizations participating in IT security events. Mr. Paresh Makwana, renowned cybersecurity expert heading ARCON’s Business Development in Africa interviewed some top IT and cyber security professionals from the region.
Key findings
The key findings from the survey are all related to the current overall IT security scenario in the region. These statistics would not only raise security alarms , but also ring the alert bell of the IT security officials to take preventive measures around the privileged accounts to protect sensitive information.
“Organizations’ IT attack surface expands when adequate attention is not given to secure the access control mechanism”, says Mr. Makwana.
Typically administrative accounts are targeted by malicious insiders or compromised third-party users and sometimes organized cyber criminals. They are always on the lookout to steal or misuse information by making an unauthorized access to target systems,” says Mr. Makwana.
Privileged Access Management (PAM) practice helps an organization to establish a rule and role based centralized access control policy over users. Therefore, any malicious attempt to breach sensitive information is prevented and the IT administrator receives alert messages about the suspicious activities,” adds Mr. Makwana.
In this context, ARCON soon would be publishing a detailed research report of this survey discussing the level of preparedness in Africa. Stay tuned to get the detailed report. Till then, check out some of our key findings from the survey –
- 88% organizations have IT security policies but 59.7% among them have not invested in PAM
- 74% organizations agreed to the fact that PAM is a major area of concern
- 79% organizations believe that most of the breaches happening today are due to compromise of privileged accounts
- 48% respondents agreed that a robust Privileged Access Management is required to curb Information security threats
ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.
