Ninety-two per cent of organisations’ biggest security is concern is users, with 81% having some degree of concern around security issues.

A new report, What Keeps You Up At Night 2019 – commissioned by security awareness training company KnowBe4 – looked at over 350 organisations globally.

The research was carried out against a background in which AI and machine learning are being leveraged by criminal organisations to help them better understand how to improve their attacks, targeting specific industry verticals, organisations and even individuals.

In the results, increases in the frequency of ransomware, phishing and crypto jacking attacks were experienced by businesses of nearly every size, vertical and locale.

When it came to attack vectors, data breaches were the primary concern, with credential compromise coming in as a close second.

The report says these two issues go hand-in-hand, as misuse of credentials remains the number one attack tactic in data breaches, according to Verizon’s 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report.

Phishing and ransomware ranked next, demonstrating that organisations are still not completely prepared to defend themselves against these relatively “old” attack vectors.

Other key findings from the report include: 

• 92% of organisations rank users as their primary security concern. And at the same time, security awareness training along with phishing testing topped the list of security initiatives that organisations need to implement. 

• Organisations today have a large number of attack vectors to prevent, monitor for, detect, alert and remediate; in terms of attacks, 95 per cent of organisations are most concerned with data breaches.

• Ensuring security is in place to meet GDPR requirements is still a challenge for 64 per cent of organisations, despite the regulation details being out for quite some time.

• Attackers’ utilisation of compromised credentials is such a common tactic, 93 per cent of organisations are aware of the problem, but still have lots of work to do to stop it. 

• When it comes to resources, 75 per cent of organisations do not have an adequate budget.

“2018 was a prolific year for successful cyberattacks, and many of them were caused by human error,” said Stu Sjouwerman, CEO of KnowBe4. “IT organisations are tasked with establishing and maintaining a layered security defence. The largest concern, as demonstrated again in this report, is employees making errors. Organisations must start with establishing a security culture, and in order to combat the escalation of social engineering, they have to ensure users are trained and tested.”