Thycotic and IANS Study Finds that 100% of Respondents Have Fallen Victim to Cybercrime in the Past Two Years

WASHINGTON, Oct. 30, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Thycotic, a provider of smart and effective privileged account management solutions for global organizations, today released the results of a new survey designed to uncover the state of organizations' privileged user management strategies and their effectiveness at securing corporate information and accounts. The survey was commissioned by Thycotic and conducted by IANS Research, collecting the experience of 100 security and IT operations professionals. Respondents included a range of roles directly tied to an organization's privileged user management strategy, including systems engineers, IT directors, CISOs and CTOs. 

Asked whether or not their organization had experienced a significant attack or data breach in the past two years, 100% of respondents said that they had suffered an attack of some type. This highlights the high rates of cybercrime that organizations face from cybercriminals and from a number of different attack vectors, making the formation of strong security policies an often overwhelming task. While 39% responded that server-side exploits were the most likely initial attack vector, 27% said that cybercriminals were able to access their network through password breaches. Other respondents listed social engineering (20%) and web application exploits (12%) as the primary methods of attack.

Other key findings from the survey include:

• 62% of respondents said that cybercriminals took advantage of unchecked, excessive privileges to move laterally or escalate access within the organization during their attack.
• 37% of respondents credited network intrusion detection solutions with the discovery of these attacks, while others were primarily aided by host-based intrusion detection software (24%), local system logs (14%), behavioral patterns of access attempts (10%) and anti-malware technology (10%).
• Of organizations that detected privileged account and credential abuse, 46.5% say that the initial attack compromised a privileged user's workstation, while 31% indicated that a privileged user's credentials were stolen.

"We have long passed the point where organizations can afford to ignore the significant threat that cybercriminals pose to companies' sensitive data and customer reputation," said Jonathan Cogley, founder and CEO of Thycotic. "With new data breaches occurring every day, those in charge of IT security must acknowledge the fact that there is no silver bullet for securing important information. Organizations need to invest in strong privileged user management and monitoring tools that allow them to not only shore up protection alongside other security initiatives, but also to aid in determining where attacks began in the event of a breach."

David Shackleford, IANS faculty, and Jonathan Cogley will host a webinar analyzing these recent findings, demystifying privileged account abuse and discussing future trends in privileged account security. The webinar, titled "Privileged Users and Data Breaches: A Match Made in Heaven?" will be held on Thursday, November 6 at 1:00 PM ET. For more information or to register, please visit http://thycotic.com/community/webinars/

For an executive summary containing the full results, please visit: http://thycotic.com/community/events/2014-ians-and-thycotic-report/

About Thycotic

Thycotic creates intuitive, reliable solutions that empower companies to remove the complexities associated with proper control and monitoring of privileged accounts. An Inc. 5000 company, Thycotic password management software is trusted by more than 180,000 IT professionals worldwide – including members of the Fortune 500, enterprises, government agencies, technology firms, universities, non-profits and managed service providers. To learn more, please visit thycotic.com.

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SOURCE Thycotic

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