Despite growing security investments in prevention, detection and response to threats, users are still making uninformed mistakes and causing breaches.
One of the basic tenets of KnowBe4 is that your users provide the organization with an opportunity to have a material (and hopefully positive) impact on a cyber attack.
They are the ones clicking malicious links, opening unknown attachments, providing company credentials on impersonated websites and falling for social engineering scams of all kinds.
Continuing on our series on the insights from the latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, this “human element” (which this year excludes internal threat actors and solely focuses on mistakes users make that cause data breaches) is involved in 68% of data breaches.
Source: Verizon
This percentage is consistent with last year. And while no growth *is* good news, it still demonstrates that users are not improving their sense of vigilance as part of their job — at least not at a fast enough rate where we’d see them outpacing improvements in social engineering and find a lower percentage in this year’s report.
It’s only through continual new-school security awareness training that helps to create a culture of security within the organization will we see the rather flat graph above begin to decline, indicating an improvement in user awareness and a decrease in unwitting involvement.
KnowBe4 empowers your workforce to make smarter security decisions every day. Over 65,000 organizations worldwide trust the KnowBe4 platform to strengthen their security culture and reduce human risk.
