The Unusual Uspects

More Often Than Not Organisations Are Warned About Security Incidents That Make The Headlines Tend To Be About Catastrophic Technology Failures Or Breaches Caused By Nefarious Actors. However, What Business Leaders Need To Realise Is That Sometimes The Most Dangerous Threats Could Be Right Under Their Noses.

The human factor plays a critical role in cybersecurity, with figures suggesting that human error is responsible for more than 90 percent of breaches.

For companies, this means that a major concern has to be the actions of their own employees, who can frequently – either deliberately or unwittingly – be the cause when things go wrong.

Latest research – some of it in the UAE and Saudi Arabia – by the US-based cybersecurity company BeyondTrust, which produces privileged access management tools, indicates just how much of a problem that employee breaches can be.

The Privileged Access Threat Report 2019 is the fourth report of its kind, and the research behind it – based on surveying the views of organisations in sectors such as government, manufacturing and retail – helps to highlight issues that are of particular concern in the Middle East.

In the UAE and Saudi Arabia, 62 percent of respondents were concerned about the intentional misuse by employees of sensitive data for personal gain. In the Asia-Pacific region, the figure was about the same, at 64 percent.

These figures were significantly higher than those for some other parts of the world, notably Germany, where 44 percent of respondents said sensitive data misuse by employees was a concern, and the United Kingdom, where the figure was 55 percent. So, what is behind the difference?

“I think it’s cultural, I think it’s values. It might be the law as well,” says Morey Haber, BeyondTrust’s chief technology officer and chief information security officer.