Indeed it’s not general management, but rather a lack of device management, that is costing Australian businesses billions of dollars every year. Poorly protected devices pose security threats to their users when they are not set up to perform their automatic updates by opening the door to SSH abuse.
According to AIR Worldwide, just in the U.S. alone 9% to 13% of the total economic loss in the United States is caused by cyber threats every year.
This sums up to an estimated $163 billion dollars. With such a large sum of money lost to cyber crime, one would think people would be more aware of how to protect themselves from these threats.
However, the ease of use of technology at one’s fingertips, has instead caused a lack of care and management of devices. Poorly protected devices provide open windows for attackers to gain access to your data easily and use it to hurt your business, customers or employees.
To make an estimate of how many cyber attacks were accomplished by a means of accessing poorly managed devices, AIR Worldwide used information from over 100,000 firms whose combined cyber event data sets and assessments provided this gargantuan result of US dollars lost.
While most devices do automatically comply with automatic updates, some people disable them and change the settings to update them manually. This would not be an issue – if people remembered to do the manual updates.
In today’s world of the Internet of Things, many devices belong to a sole network that interconnects them; and while these networks are generally protected by SSL/TLS encryption, the keys to that encryption often lack proper security measures.
While most IT specialists and engineers concentrate on the function of devices and cloud performance, they do not count with the knowledge or experience to provide cyber security.
In order to protect a network effectively, it is necessary to work with a security team that will adequately protect you from possible network breaches.
But why are cyber security teams not more popular parts of a company? IT specialists and engineers are often regarded as the know-it-all of anything related to technology and devices. In order for engineers to keep control of an area of their work, they often keep SSH keys a secret to avoid interference from third parties. Some systems can have millions of keys, which is why a whole cybersecurity team is needed.
This jealous little secret belonging to the IT department could very well be the thing that could cause you a security breach and potentially cost you a large sum of money.
As businesses grow and transform, it’s important to keep in mind that investing in a team of cybersecurity experts will give you peace of mind and ensure that your business is taken care of in areas that may have not thought to be in danger in the past.
