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Employees using IT resources for the wrong thing could be costly

What costs your company more? Is a ransomware attack more costly than an employee sharing data with somebody they shouldn’t?

Cybercrime is bad and we can all agree that, no matter the incident, businesses would rather avoid losing money, data or business continuity due to ne’er-do-wells online. However, knowing what sort of incidents are on average more costly may help you to secure against them.

To that end, Kaspersky has released the latest edition of its annual IT Security Economics which outlines the average cost of various types of data breaches.

So to answer the question we posed, the most costly type of breach in the Middle East, Turkey and Africa (META) region is when an employee uses IT resources for things they shouldn’t. When an attack is executed as a result in inappropriate use of IT resources, it can cost a business an average of over $1 million, as do fileless attacks.

You can see Kaspersky’s breakdown in the image below.

Data from The latest edition of Kaspersky’s annual IT Security Economics report.

While fileless attacks can be mitigated with software for the most part, Dan in accounting using the business internet to download torrents may not be as easy to guard against.

“Some threats like inappropriate IT resource use by employees and attacks involving data shared with suppliers are even harder to mitigate using an algorithm. This adds up to the grim reality of the modern threat landscape, where businesses have to repel the efforts of organised crime, rather than simply block ‘malicious software’. A truly efficient strategy therefore requires a combination of security technology, the analysis of external and internal cyber threat intelligence, constant monitoring, and the application of best practices for incident response,” explains managing director for the META region at Kaspersky, Amir Kanaan.

This report once again hammers home the importance of cybersecurity training, especially in an era where more employees want to work from home.

That doesn’t mean software and endpoint security should be ignored but rather highlights just how wide the scope cybersecurity needs to be in this day and age.

You can find the Kaspersky IT Security Economics report for 2021 here.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]

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