Ransomware continues to plague organizations

Ransomware attacks, which first occurred in the late 1980s with the PC Cyborg virus, have accelerated due to the rise of cryptocurrency as a preferred payment method.

On this, Thales concludes that malware, ransomware and phishing continue to affect organizations. According to this study, 21% have experienced a ransomware attack in the last year, and 43% have experienced a significant impact on their operations.

“Although teams around the world have continued to face data security challenges, our findings indicate that companies need to take urgent action to develop stronger cybersecurity strategies,” said Sebastien Cano, Senior Vice President of Cybersecurity activities. Thales Cloud Protection and Licensing.

Data visibility is a challenge

As more companies adopt multi-cloud strategies and hybrid working remains the norm, IT managers continue to face the problem of data sprawl in their organizations and find it more difficult to locate all of their data.

Just over half (56%) of IT managers are very confident or fully aware of where their data is stored, up from 64% a year ago1, and only a quarter (25%) say they are able to classify all your data.

Threats and challenges in compliance

Throughout 2021, security incidents remained at a high level, with almost a third (29%) of companies experiencing a breach in the last 12 months. Additionally, nearly half (43%) of IT managers admitted to failing a compliance audit.

Globally, IT leaders ranked malware (56%), ransomware (53%), and phishing (40%) as the top source of security attacks. Managing these risks is an ongoing challenge, with nearly half (45%) of IT managers reporting an increase in the volume, severity, or scope of cyberattacks in the past 12 months.

The cloud increases complexity and risks

Cloud use is on the rise, with more than a third (34%) of respondents saying they use more than 50 software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and 16% use more than 100 applications.

Thales concludes that malware, ransomware and phishing continue to affect organizations around the world

However, 51% of IT managers agree that it is more complex to manage privacy and data protection regulations in a cloud environment than in their organization’s on-premises networks, up from 46% last year.

The Thales Data Threat Report 2022 also highlighted the significant push among businesses to store data in the cloud, with 32% of respondents stating that around halfi of their workloads and data reside in external clouds, while a quarter (23%) declared more than 60%. However, 44% indicated that their cloud environments had been breached or failed an audit.

Concern about remote work

After another full year of working remotely, managing security risks has proven to be a major challenge for businesses. It is worrying that the majority of companies (79%) continue to fear the security risks and threats posed by remote work. Only half of IT managers (55%) say they have implemented multi-factor authentication (MFA), a number that has not changed from the previous year.

emerging threats

The report also shows that IT managers have a wide range of technology spending priorities, suggesting that they are serious about combating complex threat environments.

A quarter (26%) stated that cloud security toolkits are their top spending priority going forward. Additionally, a similar number of IT managers (25%) stated that they prioritize key management, with Zero Trust3 being an important strategy for 23%.

IT managers are increasingly aware of the challenges they face in the future. When asked to identify quantum computing security threats, 52% said they were concerned about “the future decryption of today’s data,” a concern likely to intensify with the increasing complexity of cloud environments .