News & Events
The Human Factor: The unspoken threat in cybersecurity
20/04/2017
By Israel Levy, CEO of BUFFERZONE, in ITProPortal.
How can a CISO best negate the threats that BYOD and mobile devices pose to their organisation?
Ever since there have been humans, there have been human errors – and some of them have been whoppers (like the Japanese trader’s “fat finger” trading error that cost his company $600 billion). Doing tasks that they really don’t understand, or mistakenly pushing a button or pulling a lever, people are the root cause of 90% of air traffic control errors, over 50% of factory equipment failures after maintenance, 37% of downtime at pharmaceutical firms, and in one of the biggest flubs of all time, human error nearly destroyed Kansas.
Such errors can destroy a company, too – by allowing hackers access to sensitive data. Trying to detect and deflect such attacks is often fruitless; the solution security officers need to concentrate on is a prevention-based one.
It seems that there is a correlation between human error and an employee’s lack of understanding of what a job entails – a problem that is responsible for tens of billions of losses for companies every year. And it also appears that the more complex a job or system is, the greater the level of human error. So it should come as no surprise that human error, negligence, a lack of understanding of what they are supposed to do, and similar human failings are responsible for more than a third of data breaches, according to a Ponemon Institute study. Computer systems today are extremely complex, and the way organizations operate today – from focusing on detection of breaches and outage issues to encouraging employees to bring their own devices to work – only increases the chances that someone at some time will make a mistake, one that could prove fatal to the organization.
Read the full article in ITProPortal.
