A recent CISCO study shows, a tenth of UK employees actively attempt to minimise their company’s security procedures.
Over 1000 UK workers were questioned by the networking technology experts to better understand the potential security problems of the emerging hybrid workplace.
Hybrid employees rarely believe that cybersecurity is their responsibility, and they regularly look for ways to circumvent security measures or engage in other risky activities such as password misuse.
Only 15% of employees use a secure password manager for applications and online services, while nearly one-fifth of employees (19%) said they use the same password for several accounts and tasks. People are more vulnerable to phishing emails and brute-force attacks, such as compromised credentials, because of this.
Another essential factor to reckless activities and workarounds might be a lack of security awareness. According to a government survey, hardly a tenth of UK businesses provide security training to all employees. About a third of employees (35%) are aware of single sign-on (SSO) techniques, and not even half of employees (49%) utilise multi-factor authentication to get access to their company’s network both of which improve security.
The majority said they would be willing to employ face recognition technology (55%) or fingerprint scanners (69%) to get access to the network, demonstrating how enterprise security is still catching up with customer usage in different areas.
Lothar Renner, CISCO’s managing director of cybersecurity in EMEAR, says:
“Workers are increasingly working from uncontrolled surroundings, employing private and non-private networks, and a variety of devices, as hybrid work is here to stay. A whole enterprise might be under siege if individuals do not know how to defend themselves and their company community against an attack.”
Workers in the United Kingdom say that they spend an average of 12 minutes a day on security measures. Even though this is less than the global average of 14 minutes, it equals to an estimated 49 hours per year and highlights a usability issue with present systems.
Organisations are increasingly having to deal with ransomware, which is considered as a major or serious threat by 84% of IT staff. Laptops (83%) were also vulnerable to unpatched vulnerabilities and firmware attacks.
Advanced security technologies can help to mitigate these attacks, but it is believed that humans are the weakest link in the attack chain. To keep their communications secure, companies should seek to educate all employees equally. Make sure they understand that cyber security is not rocket science.
It is an issue of not exposing valuable information to hackers. It is all about employing basic security measures, such as creating strong passwords and using 2FA, even if they are more difficult to remember than their children’s names or dates of birth.
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