A global report released today by CyberArk shows that 79 percent of senior security professionals state that cybersecurity has taken a back seat in the last year in favor of accelerating other digital business initiatives.
The CyberArk 2022 Identity Security Threat Landscape Report identifies how the rise of human and machine identities – often running into the hundreds of thousands per organization – has driven a buildup of identity-related cybersecurity “debt,” exposing organizations to greater cybersecurity risk.
A Growing Identities Problem
Every major IT or digital initiative results in increasing interactions among people, applications and processes, creating large numbers of digital identities. If these digital identities go unmanaged and unsecured, they can represent significant cybersecurity risks:
- Sixty-eight percent of non-humans or bots have access to sensitive data and assets.
- The average staff member has greater than 30 digital identities.1
- Machine identities now outweigh human identities by a factor of 45x on average.
- Eighty-seven percent store secrets in multiple places across DevOps environments, while 80 percent say developers typically have more privileges than necessary for their roles.
The 2022 Attack Surface
Secular trends of digital transformation, cloud migration and attacker innovation are expanding the attack surface. The report delves into the prevalence and type of cyber threats facing security teams and areas where they see elevated risk:
- Credential access was the number one area of risk for respondents (at 40 percent), followed by defense evasion (31 percent), execution (31 percent), initial access (29 percent) and privilege escalation (27 percent).2
- More than 70 percent of the organizations surveyed have experienced ransomware attacks in the past year: two each on average.
- Sixty-two percent have done nothing to secure their software supply chain post the SolarWinds attack and most (64 percent) admit a compromise of a software supplier would mean an attack on their organization could not be stopped.
Getting Into Cybersecurity Debt
Security professionals agree that recent organization-wide digital initiatives have come at a price. This price is Cybersecurity Debt: security programs and tools that have grown but not kept pace with what organizations have put in place to drive operations and support growth. This debt has arisen through not properly managing and securing access to sensitive data and assets, and a lack of Identity Security controls is driving up risk and creating consequences.
The debt is compounded by the recent rise in geopolitical tensions, which have had direct impact on critical infrastructure, highlighting the need for heightened awareness of the physical consequences of cyber-attacks:
- Seventy-nine percent agree that their organization prioritized maintaining business operations over ensuring robust cyber security in the last 12 months.
- Less than half (48 percent) have Identity Security controls in place for their business-critical applications.
What Can Be Done?
- Push for Transparency – 85 percent say that a Software Bill of Materials would reduce the risk of compromise stemming from the software supply chain.
- Introduce Strategies to Manage Sensitive Access – The top three measures most CIOs and CISOs questioned in the survey have introduced (or plan to introduce), each cited by 54 percent of respondents:
- real-time monitoring and analysis to audit all privileged session activity
- least privilege security/Zero Trust principles on infrastructure that runs business-critical applications
- processes to isolate business-critical applications from internet-connected devices to restrict lateral movement.
- Prioritize Identity Security Controls to Enforce Zero Trust Principles: The top three strategic initiatives to reinforce Zero Trust principles are: workload security; Identity Security tools; and data security.
To learn more about CyberArk, visit https://www.cyberark.com
