‘Could do better’: Survey’s verdict on ANZ cyber security

Cyber security company, CyberArk has released the findings of its 10th annual Global Advanced Threat Landscape Survey saying it show a number of countries, New Zealand included, could do better with their cyber security practices.

This year’s survey sought to determine whether global enterprises were learning lessons from highly publicised breaches, and making positive changes within their organisations as a result.

The survey found 16 percent of organisations in Australia and New Zealand were not securing third-party vendor access, a figure second only to Singapore, 26 percent, and well below best practice, two percent in France.

When it came to monitoring third party vendor access, Australia/New Zealand rated joint worst with Singapore where 33 percent of respondents do no not do so. In France and the US the figure was only 10 percent.

The survey found a number of other bad habits common across Australia and New Zealand (it did not break out the results for each country)

”Forty four percent of organisations still store privileged and administrative passwords in a Word document or spreadsheet, while 32 percent use a shared server or USB stick,” it said.

“Only three percent have made implementing privileged account security their number one priority in response to greater security awareness.”

It added: “The vast majority of organisations (92 percent) have a cyber security emergency response plan [but] this preparedness is undermined by a lack of communication and testing – only 47 percent communicate and regularly test their plan with all IT staff.”

CyberArk surveyed 750 IT and IT security decision makers including C-level executives, directors and department heads among enterprise organisations from the United States, Europe (France, Germany, United Kingdom), Israel and Asia Pacific (Australia, New Zealand, Singapore).