Work from home comes with a cost: Canadian cyberattacks could have been described as a trend in 2020, affecting 86% of the companies in the country, states the Global Security Insights Report on the VMware Carbonblack website.
Canadian Cyberattacks: a Risk for Organizations in 2020
2020 was a hard year for Canada’s organizations: Canadian cyberattacks were at every corner. As stated in a report from VMware, 86% of Canadian companies suffered from a data breach in 2020 and the reason was the increased number of employees working from home.
What Led to Canadian Cyberattacks
There were 5 major causes for the Canadian cyberattacks, stated in VMware’s report, which analyzed, among other things, the trends in cybersecurity attack and defense:
Remote work is insecure, thus more data breaches: the report says that 78% of those attending the survey said that work from home led to a big number of data breaches, because of the operating systems vulnerabilities (19.5%) and third-party apps (16%). Also, 79% observed that cyberattacks are now more sophisticated.
Cloud popularity does not fulfill the needs of security: Cloud has become popular and is used by everyone, but since its security strategies are global, 58% of respondents agree that this means more exposure to threat.
AI (Artificial Intelligence) implementation is delayed because of security concerns: 68,5% of respondents are reluctant to use AI-ML-based apps as they are concerned about safety.
CISOs (Chief Information Security Officers) are most concerned about applications and workloads: poor visibility over applications data is one of the reasons why 58% of those who answered the survey said they cannot prevent properly future Canadian cyberattacks.
Underestimation of data breach and delay in taking action: material breaches are the most feared by security professionals, 86% of the companies experienced a cyberattack with 8 out of 10 being material ones, but only 31.5% of them updated their security policy.
What Is The Solution?
Because of the increased number of cyberattacks in Canada last year, the cybersecurity domain is seen now from a whole different point of view. Thus being said, the companies are eager for better cybersecurity solutions and aware of what they need to do:
- Enhance visibility on workloads and endpoints
- Embrace an inherent approach to cloud-first security
- Give the necessary credit to the reality of ransomware attacks and take action
- Treat security as a distributive service
Therefore, infrastructure security incorporation and diminution of point solutions number are the main focuses for 34% of the organizations, 29.5 % of the companies worked on security technology updates and 95% of security leaders want to concentrate on the cloud-first security strategy that should lead to less Canadian cyberattacks.
Sean Forkan, the VMware Vice President Security Sales – Americas, supports these facts:
(…) legacy systems are no longer sufficient. It is imperative that Canadian organizations have the right tools and technologies in place to implement a security strategy built for a cloud-first world.