Which age-group poses the greatest threat to business cybersecurity? Well, a recent study points out that it’s the millennials- those in the 18-25 age group who tend to break basic security rules.
A new research report from identity governance platform SailPoint states that nearly 90 percent of youngsters in the 18-25 age group break basic security rules, reusing passwords across multiple accounts. It’s these millennials, who are supposed to be tech-savvy and who are entering the workforce in large numbers, who take a wrong approach to security.
The SailPoint Annual Market Pulse Survey had covered 1,600 employees on the global level. Of these, 75 percent admitted to reusing passwords across different accounts, including work and personal accounts. When SailPoint had conducted its first similar survey in 2014, the figure was 56%.
The study points out that this trend could be posing a big threat to any organizations efforts to bring about a digital transformation. As a result, there is an element of risk and a sense of frustration that prevails in organizations between users who seek to work efficiently and the IT team that seeks to secure the business. Almost 55 percent of respondents in the survey said that they see the IT department as a source of inconvenience. As a result, employees would skirt IT policies and they would even deploy software without seeking the help of the IT department. Almost 31 percent of people covered by the survey showed this tendency, to deploy software with no help from the IT department.
The SailPoint Market Pulse Survey report clarifies, “Efforts to get around IT may not necessarily be done with malicious intent, but the reality is they directly increase IT risk for the organization. For example, 13% of employees admitted they would not immediately notify their IT department if they thought they had been hacked. Further compounding this issue is a workforce that tends not to understand the role of all employees in keeping an organization secure, as 49% of respondents would actually blame the IT department for a cyberattack if one occurred as a result of an employee being hacked.”
Juliette Rizkallah, CMO, SailPoint says, “To secure and enable today’s modern workforce, the users have become the new ‘security perimeter’ and their digital identities are the common link across an organization’s IT ecosystem at every stage of its digital transformation…By taking an identity-centric approach to security, IT can gain full visibility and control into which applications and data that users, including both human and non-human bots, are accessing to do their jobs. This approach allows enterprises of all sizes to confidently address the tension between enablement and security exposed in our Market Pulse Survey.”
The SailPoint Market Pulse Survey had covered organizations with at least 1,000 employees and had interviewed 1,600 employees. The companies were spread over different countries- the U.S. U.K, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Australia.
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