Investments not keeping pace

The global study "Identity Security Threat Landscape" by CyberArk shows that companies have an ever-increasing number of human and machine identities. In many cases, this number is in the hundreds of thousands. This inevitably creates greater cybersecurity risks for enterprises. Trends such as digital transformation, cloud
Migration and new attack techniques are increasingly jeopardizing IT security. Bypassing defenses (39 percent) poses the greatest risk for respondents, followed by credential access (37 percent) and privilege escalation (37 percent). Sixty-nine percent of organizations surveyed have been affected by ransomware attacks in the past year. 59 percent did nothing to secure their software supply chain after the SolarWinds attack, and 66 percent admit that compromising a software supplier would mean an attack on their company could not be stopped.

Security experts agree that enterprise-wide digital initiatives are not adequately supported by security programs and tools. For example, 73 percent state that their company has prioritized maintaining business operations over ensuring robust cybersecurity in the past 12 months. In addition, 52 percent state that they have not established identity security controls for their mission-critical applications. The healthcare and energy and utilities industries in particular are seeing an increase in attacks, especially on the software supply chain.