A recent survey conducted by Swivel Secure has found that British businesses have a sloppy attitude to cyber security.
According to the research, more than half of all business owners (51%) are ‘unconcerned’ with the security of their corporate systems, with one in four readily admitting to reusing the same username and password across all their corporate and personal accounts, from their Facebook page to their confidential corporate systems. 67% also admitted to keeping a written log, or using a system of their own devising, to help them keep track of the usernames and passwords they use regularly. These simple and easily avoidable mistakes make their risk of cyber attack soar.
“Just as the government is waking up to cybercrime we discover that company bosses are half asleep,” comments Chris Russell, VP Engineering, Swivel Secure. “The problem is that business owners think that cybercrime is something that happens to other people, without appreciating the value of the data they hold and the motivations of people who may want to access it. They read about security breaches at big multinational firms like Google and LinkedIn, but don’t realise that these same login details are probably also being used to access their own systems. It’s time business owners realised that usernames and passwords are actually not secure at all.”
“It’s a big problem that’s getting worse; company data is more at risk than ever before,” continues Russell. “Bosses and employees now want to connect their smartphones and tablets to their work systems. Flexible working is gaining in popularity, so more of us are logging in remotely. Too often, new working behaviours like these are still only protected by outdated username and password gateways. And when, inevitably, they are shared, lost, leaked or stolen, it really doesn’t matter how impenetrable your corporate firewall is because you’ve done the digital equivalent of handing over the keys to the safe.”
Strangely perhaps, 73% of business owners defend that they keep track of online security threats like hackers, Trojans and viruses, and do not consider weak access credentials as a potential security breach. “The government claims cybercrime costs the UK economy £27 billion a year,” adds Russell. “That’s the equivalent of building one of Boris Johnson’s Thames Estuary airports every twelve months. You can’t help but wonder how much of that could be saved if business owners took a few simple steps to transition to a 21st century system for authenticating users and protecting their corporate data.”
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