News Insider Threat

Biggest Threats Come From Inside The Enterprise, Survey Says

Tim Wilson

Lack of network visibility, insider threats are top worries in survey of security pros

Security pros are more worried about the lack of visibility into their networks and about insider threats than they are about being hacked by outsiders, according to a new survey.

"The State of Network Security 2012: Attitudes and Opinions" (PDF), a survey of more than 180 IT and security professionals conducted during RSA 2012, indicates that poor internal security management presents a greater risk than malicious threats.

More Security Insights

White Papers
More >>
Reports
More >>
Webcasts
More >>

When asked to cite the greatest risk to enterprise security, 28.7 percent cited a lack of visibility into networks and applications, while 27.5 percent highlighted insider threats, according to the study. Less than 20 percent focused on external threats, such as hackers.

"While industry focus naturally gravitates toward the latest buzzwords, such as advanced persistent threats, we were surprised to find that practitioners primarily voice concerns with how to better manage security,” said Nimmy Reichenberg, vice president of marketing and business development at AlgoSec, the security firm that sponsored the study. "Poor visibility into what is occurring in the network, insider threats, and poor processes that result in out-of-process changes are responsible for much of the day-to-day risk."

More than half of the respondents said their organizations had incurred a system outage in the past 12 months due to an out-of-process change, such as a change to firewall configuration, according to the survey.

Have a comment on this story? Please click "Add a Comment" below. If you'd like to contact Dark Reading's editors directly, send us a message.

Tim Wilson


Related Reading

Dark Reading Discussions

Start the Discussion


InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.