Biggest Threats Come From Inside The Enterprise, Survey Says

Security pros are more worried about the lack of visibility into their networks and about insider threats than they are about being hacked by outsiders, according to a new survey.

"The State of Network Security 2012: Attitudes and Opinions" (PDF), a survey of more than 180 IT and security professionals conducted during RSA 2012, indicates that poor internal security management presents a greater risk than malicious threats.

When asked to cite the greatest risk to enterprise security, 28.7 percent cited a lack of visibility into networks and applications, while 27.5 percent highlighted insider threats, according to the study. Less than 20 percent focused on external threats, such as hackers.

"While industry focus naturally gravitates toward the latest buzzwords, such as advanced persistent threats, we were surprised to find that practitioners primarily voice concerns with how to better manage security,” said Nimmy Reichenberg, vice president of marketing and business development at AlgoSec, the security firm that sponsored the study. "Poor visibility into what is occurring in the network, insider threats, and poor processes that result in out-of-process changes are responsible for much of the day-to-day risk."

More than half of the respondents said their organizations had incurred a system outage in the past 12 months due to an out-of-process change, such as a change to firewall configuration, according to the survey.

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