Careless insiders are government’s biggest cybersecurity threat
If you were to guess the biggest threat to government cybersecurity, you’d probably say some outside hacking syndicate. You’d be wrong.
“Our security holes begin at the top,” said a network manager at a federal agency. “Senior management expects “that they are protected and they are above any security holes – to that effect, they insist on admin rights to network resources. The administration supports this view and turns a ‘blind eye’ to the risk.”
In December 2014, Market Connections, a leading government market research provider, in conjunction with SolarWinds conducted its second annual blind survey of 200 IT and IT security decision makers in the federal government, military and intelligence communities to uncover their most critical IT security challenges and to determine how to make potential security threats visible so IT can confront them.
A key finding was that federal IT professionals identified careless and untrained insiders as the greatest source of cybersecurity threats – over malicious external sources such as hackers and terrorists – yet disparately reported that malicious external threat sources maintained priority for threat prevention investment.
View the infographic for data on top sources of security threats and most damaging breaches, top obstacles to threat prevention, concern versus investment in resources and top tools to prevent threats.
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