Cyber danger from the inside? Not with us...
Are angry and careless employees a safety problem for companies? Austria's managers place the highest level of trust in their workforces, while Germany is generally confident and Switzerland is more cautious. These are the findings of a recent survey conducted by cyber security service provider Sophos.
Time and again, publications discuss the major threat to cyber security posed by employees. In particular, the focus is on disgruntled, bribed or angry former employees who have had data stolen. Human error is also regularly identified as another crucial and dangerous factor for cyber security. They can lead to serious security incidents resulting from carelessness within the workforce. Regular data security training for teams is therefore standard in most companies today, as is support from a modern IT security infrastructure. But how high do company managers actually consider the risk from within to be?
The cyber security service provider Sophos commissioned the market research institute Ipsos to survey representatives from C-level management (and explicitly not IT managers) in Germany, Austria and Switzerland on this question. Overall, the results show that managers in the three countries have a high level of trust in their workforces, both across industries and across smaller and larger companies.
Austria places great trust in its employees
Significantly more than half (64% in total) and remarkably more than in neighboring countries, Austrian managers rated the risk posed by their teams as very low (34%) or low (30%). Austrian retailers in particular have great confidence in their employees - as many as 62.5% of respondents believe that employees pose no risk. In general, it is also clear that it is the larger companies (200 employees or more) that rely on the safety awareness of their employees (46.2%). In the neighboring country, only 2 percent rate the danger from within as high; unlike in Germany and Switzerland, no one thinks it is very high.
Germany is generally confident
In Germany, too, more than half (56.7% in total) of the managers surveyed say that they consider the risk of security incidents triggered by employees to be very low (25.9%) or low (30.8%). A total of 26.9% see a medium risk, with even more caution among the representatives from retail companies surveyed, 35.5% of whom assume a medium risk. In Germany, only 1.5% of bosses consider the possibility of security incidents by employees to be particularly high.
For Switzerland: trust is good, caution makes sense
Swiss company managers are slightly less optimistic than their counterparts in neighboring countries when it comes to the level of cybersecurity awareness among the workforce. Here, slightly less than half of respondents (48% in total) believe that the risk from within is very low or low (24% in each case). Management in the manufacturing sector are particularly confident in this regard, with 42.1% of them describing the insider threat as very low. In Switzerland, 32% of those surveyed believe that the risk is medium, while only 2% of respondents in Switzerland rate it as very high.
Source: Sophos
