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Holistic approach to cybersecurity required as infrastructure grows more complex

In late May, Mimecast released its third annual State of Email Security report, that included insights from 1 025 global IT decision makers.

The report found that impersonation attacks increased almost 70 percent in comparison to the results of the previous year, with 73 percent of the organisations impacted by impersonation. This resulted in direct loss of customers of up to 28 percent while financial loss was 29 percent, and data loss 40 percent.

As business’ data and infrastructure become more sophisticated, so does their cybersecurity needs.

Old tricks still working

With that in mind, head of innovation at Intec South Africa, Daniel Lotter, explains why businesses are struggling to secure their data and company infrastructures, and what steps they should take in safeguarding them.

The Intec exec notes that even in 2019 people are still being tricked into clicking on fake links and email attachments, which results in distressing consequences for these companies.

“Seems the old tricks still work the best for criminals, ransomware, phishing and social engineering are all in the rise, with phishing attacks the most prominent type of cyber attack”, he adds.

According to Lotter, making things worse is nation-state politics entering the picture and complicating things even further, adding that a year ago few people would have thought that going with a specific platform would potentially compromise their cybersecurity.

“Today you don’t even know if you can trust your hardware vendor anymore,” he adds.

Lotter says there are three measures in particular to assist businesses in how to deal with an increasingly diverse threat landscape.

Focus on your people

The first step for businesses is the need to create a culture of security with multi-layered, holistic defence system that covers people, policies and procedures.

“Until every person in a company understands how and why they have to protect the corporate IT assets, system and data, businesses will remain vulnerable to attack,” emphasises Lotter.

Lose the siloes

He says that many businesses still adopt a patchwork approach, with different applications from different suppliers tacked together loosely to try to combat different threats. An example of this would be a firewall from one supplier and an anti-virus from another.

“This isn’t just bad security, it’s bad business,” he adds.

Hire an IT expect

Lotter concludes by saying that hiring an IT expect is a smart move, especially when it comes to helping keep cybersecurity costs down through a holistic and intelligent approach.

“This frees you up to focus on your core business, while reducing business and even taking advantage of new opportunity,” he concludes.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]

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