Intelligent CISO Issue 18 | Page 57

Study shows nearly one-third of security pros have found GDPR ineffective ne Identity, a leader in helping organisations get identity and access management (IAM) right, has announced the results of a survey of over 300 security professionals. O The results indicated that while the majority of organisations store sensitive data such as emails, salary and compensation details, intellectual property and customer data in the cloud (76%), they still struggle with detecting a breach, with two-thirds confessing that it would take an hour or longer to spot a hijacked account, if at all. Worryingly, the real time detection of malicious actors within the system is difficult for more than a quarter of organisations (26%), which together with spotting an insider attack (24%) were recognised as the most challenging aspects of dealing with a cyberattack. “Nearly all breaches involve a malicious actor escalating privileges or with an insider abusing their access permissions. I was surprised to find out that – knowing where an attack will likely come from – so many respondents admitted to being unprepared,” said Todd Peterson, IAM evangelist at One Identity. This poses a concern especially in light of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is now over a year old and stipulates that data breaches must be reported within 72 hours of the breach discovery. However, the time to discovery is more likely to be months – according to the latest Data Breach Investigation Report created by Verizon. The study also found that GDPR is a very divisive topic among security professionals, indicating that nearly a third of respondents (30%) think that GDPR regulations were either ineffective or that data breaches seemed to have gotten worse. Shedding some light on the findings, Peterson said: “GDPR was never meant to protect the data against hacks and the feeling that data breaches have increased since its introduction is probably due to the fact that many data leaks that would otherwise go unnoticed now need to be reported to the relevant regulatory bodies. “What GDPR did do, however, was make people more conscious about data and privacy, and made companies think about the importance of knowing who can – and tracking who does – access databases of sensitive information. This study proves that there is still work to be done on educating the industry, particularly around equating compliance to security.” u www.intelligentciso.com | Issue 18 57