As cyberattacks escalate in an environment where we constantly shift from working from home to in the office, executives are pushing up their investment in cybersecurity, data from two technology players in SA shows.
More than 90% of technology executives across SA, Kenya and Zimbabwe have pushed their focus and investment in cybersecurity, driven by the growth in remote and digital ways of working. This according to a new report by technology group Liquid Intelligent Technologies, part of businessperson Strive Masiyiwa’s Econet group.
The global Cyber Exposure Index ranks SA sixth on its list of most-targeted countries for cyberattacks, an online threat that escalated in the Covid-19 pandemic when more people shifted their spending online and work remotely. The list of companies that have suffered a breach is long but the latest example is Transnet, bringing three ports, including the critical Durban Harbour, to a standstill and forcing the state-owned logistics group to declare a force majeure.
Liquid’s Cyber Security Report surveyed 141 executives from the three countries, 72 being from SA. It established some of the main concerns about cybersecurity threats and the most significant effects of digital breaches on an organisational level.
A key insight suggests that 79% of businesses from the three countries attribute an increase in cybersecurity threats to the advent of remote working. Data breaches such as data extortion, data leakage and data disclosure constitute almost 71% of the cyberattacks for Kenyan businesses, and more than 70% of SA and Zimbabwean organisations consider email attacks such as phishing — which uses disguised email as a weapon — the most prominent digital threats.
This is in line with a new study from IBM, which shows that data breaches have cost SA companies R46m on average in 2021, the highest in the six years that the US technology giant has been carrying out its research around the cost of attacks.
IBM says “security may have lagged behind these rapid IT [information technology] changes” that came as a result of the shift to remote working and increased cloud computing use.
Its 2021 Cost of a Data Breach Report was conducted in partnership with research outfit the Ponemon Institute. The study analysed real-world data breaches of 100,000 records or fewer, experienced by more than 500 organisations worldwide between May 2020 and March 2021.
The report showed that the average time to detect and contain a data breach was at its highest for organisations in SA, taking 237 days — 184 to detect and 53 to contain. Those companies that did contain a breach in less than 200 days were shown to save almost R7m. According to IBM, it would normally cost organisations R2,300 per lost or stolen record on average. Breaches in the financial, industrial and services industries were most expensive, costing R1,548 per record.
Liquid says some of the biggest security concerns for businesses using cloud services are: managing user access to information; data loss; recovery; and lack of security controls made available by cloud providers.
On the other hand, IBM found that compromised business emails were the most common method of attack for breaches, costing organisations more than R71m on average. Malicious insider attacks, social engineering — which uses psychological manipulation to trick users into making security mistakes or giving away sensitive information — and vulnerabilities in third-party software were also found to be the primary attack methods in data breaches, with all three costing above R50m on average.
IBM Southern Africa's Sheldon Hand says: “Organisations need to double down on protecting their most valuable data — whether its customer, employee and company information — and ensure they have advanced security processes, like automation and formal incident response teams, in place”.
Ignus de Villiers, from Liquid, shares the sentiment, saying that cybersecurity should be at the centre of every business conversation and emphasising the need to establish robust frameworks and policies.
“Critically, the framework must look beyond technical security controls to include information security management covering governance, risk, compliance, people, processes and technology”.
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