Page 10 - EngineerIT December 2021

ICT CYBER SECURITY

97% of SA IT professionals say that

their environments don't prioritise

cyber security enough

Just three percent of South African companies place enough emphasis on cyber-readiness to prevent
and respond to cybersecurity, McAfee Enterprise and FireEye research found.

inety-seven percent of South African IT security professionals believe that the for suspicious emails and behaviours, is
organisations they work for do not place sufficient emphasis on preparing and vitally important. An organisation can invest
Nprotecting their infrastructure to withstand a cyber security attack. This is despite in the most stringent of security regimes,
the fact that 90% of these professionals feel that their industry has experienced an increase but its users can often become its Achilles’
in cyber threats since the onset of COVID-19 in early 2019, with data breaches, malware heel – it takes just one person to click
attacks and phishing scams being the three cyber risks seen to be most threatening. on a malicious file or link, and the whole
Sixty-three percent of these professionals add that there should be more emphasis on organisation can be compromised,” he says.
employee training and awareness about cybersecurity issues, with 61% saying that there
should be more resources allocated towards planning for how to efficiently respond to them.
The findings were revealed when McAfee Enterprise and FireEye recently released
research titled Cybercrime in a Pandemic World: The Impact of COVID-19, which highlighted
gaps in organisations’ approaches to cyber security, in the face of increasing cyber threats.
“The research shows that South Africa’s cybersecurity teams and professionals
understand their organisations’ weaknesses, and that they have identified the areas that
need to be addressed for them to be able to do their jobs more productively,” says Carlo
Bolzonello, country manager for McAfee Enterprise in South Africa.
“Creating awareness among team members, as well as training users to be on the lookout

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