95% of workers in mega firms think their cybersecurity culture is poor — report

Fresh report released by ISACA’s CSX North America cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, has shown that as cybersecurity threats continue to escalate worldwide, the ISACA/CMMI Institute Cybersecurity Culture Report found that just 5 percent of employees think their organization’s cybersecurity culture is as advanced as it needs to be to protect their business from internal and external threats.

This means that about 95 per cent of workers in blue chip firms do not trust their current security systems and applications used by their conglomerates worldwide.

More than 4,800 business and technology professionals shared these insights in the global research study, conducted via online polling in June 2018.

National Daily recalls that cybersecurity culture is a workplace culture in which security awareness and behaviors are integrated into everyone’s daily operations, as well as an executive leadership priority.

In a threat-ripe environment, an effective cybersecurity culture can help employees understand their roles and responsibilities in keeping their organizations safe and customer data secure. However, just 34 percent of respondents say they understand their role in their organizations’ cyber culture.

Companies must take an all-hands-on-deck approach to counter cyberattack threats, the report summarizes.

Doug Grindstaff II, SVP of Cybersecurity Solutions at CMMI Institute, remarked that “Enlisting the entire workforce to mitigate an enterprise’s cyber risk is an emerging practice,” stressing that “We are hearing a lot of feedback about how organizations can move the needle on employee involvement. It’s challenging, but organizations are rightly concerned by the growing sophistication of cyberattacks.”

Widespread employee involvement correlates strongly with the minority of organizations that have achieved strong satisfaction with their cybersecurity culture. Nine in ten employees (92 percent) at these organizations say that their C-level executives share an excellent understanding of the underlying issues, which may be why they loop-in their employees so well; 84 percent of employees at these organizations say they understand their role in cybersecurity.

Other critical findings include among other that many organizations lack the first—and all-important—step toward a cybersecurity culture; aligning the entire workforce with the organization’s cybersecurity policies requires significant capital; organizations that report a significant gap between their current and desired cybersecurity culture are spending just 19 percent of their annual cybersecurity budget on training and tools; organizations that believe their cybersecurity culture is where it is supposed to be are spending more than twice as much (43 percent).

Rob Clyde, NACD Board Leadership Fellow and ISACA Board Chair, argued that “A key motivator for organizations delaying investing in their cybersecurity cultures is a lack of awareness about the attempted threats and ongoing risks, as well as a lack of awareness about the assets at risk to cybersecurity threats.”

He added that “Individuals tend to underestimate the potential damage and overestimate technology’s ability to limit such incidents. Doing so puts their organizations at serious risk.”