This is Part 1 of a 3 part blog series on the importance of endpoint security in protecting your server environment. Information for this blog sourced from Sophos: Seven Uncomfortable Truths about Endpoint Security, accessible here.

Cyber Attacks, Large and Small

Larger organizations are most often the target of malicious attacks, as they are considered more lucrative targets than smaller organizations. From accessing personal information to sensitive industry documents, the opportunities for gain from targeted attacks is higher.

Larger organizations have responded to some degree by ensuring that they have IT resources available to deal with identifying and cleaning up threats, to tightening IT security, providing staff training and guarding against server attacks in the future.

Even with these resources, large organizations continue to be targeted, and will continue to be targeted for as long as there are opportunities.

Sophos commissioned a study into how larger organizations are dealing with ongoing IT security threats, and uncovered trends that could help organizations large and small face ongoing cybersecurity threats.

Survey Results

Cyberattacks are the new normal:

While larger organizations did report higher attacks than smaller, the number of global attacks on companies with under 1000 was still 63%, a not insignificant majority. The global average was 68%.

At this point, these results should serve as a warning to every organization that relies on cloud servers to store information and coordinate workflows that cybersecurity is an absolute essential part of your organization’s business plan.

In addition, the average number of incidents per organization was 2 with 10% of organizations reporting 4 or more attacks within the last year.

Once a network weakness is identified, if significant effort isn’t spent in shoring up weaknesses, organizations will remain vulnerable.

Most threats are discovered on the server:

Endpoints are the most vulnerable to infiltration, as these are login points for users, but most threats aren’t discovered until they reach the server, which is where the highest value information is stored.

Most IT administrators have historically been less concerned about server security because there are limited user accounts accessing information. However, with new endpoints opening up server access with cloud based software, these risks cannot be ignored.

Stay tuned for more!

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