Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 58 | Page 25

TALKING TRENDING business ‘‘ REPORT REVEALS 60% OF UAE ORGANISATIONS EXPECT TO SUFFER EMAIL-BORNE ATTACK The fourth annual report from Mimecast finds greatest new concern is email and web spoofing. Mimecast, a leading email and data security company, has unveiled its fourth-annual State of Email Security 2020 report. This report summarises details from 1,025 global IT decision makers on the current state of cybersecurity. Providing year-over-year comparisons, along with Mimecast’s analysis from the first 100-day period of the Coronavirus public health crisis, the report is designed to both offer valuable insights into recent attack trends organisations are challenged with and to serve as a guide to drive continuous improvement to any organisation’s cyber-resilience strategy. The findings in this year’s State of Email Security report demonstrate that despite high levels of confidence in respondents’ cyberresilience strategies, there is a clear need for improvement. The large majority (77%) of global respondents say they have or are actively rolling out a cyber-resilience strategy. In the UAE, 80% of respondents are doing the same. Yet an astounding 60% of respondents in the UAE, and globally believe it is inevitable or likely they will suffer from an email-borne attack in the coming year. UAE respondents cite data loss (54%), a decrease in employee productivity (40%) and business downtime (24%) due to a lack of cyber-resilience preparedness. “We’re seeing the same threats that organisations have faced for years playing out with tactics matched to world events to evade detection. The increases in remote working due to the global pandemic have only amplified the risks businesses face from these threats, making the need for effective cyberresilience essential,” said Joshua Douglas, Vice President of Threat Intelligence. “It’s likely that cyber-resilience strategies are lacking key elements, or don’t have any at all, depending on the organisation’s maturity in cybersecurity. Security leaders need to invest in a strategy that builds resilience moving at the same pace as Digital Transformation. This means organisations must apply a layered approach to email security, one that consists “ 74% OF RESPONDENTS WERE HIT BY MALICIOUS ACTIVITY SPREAD FROM EMPLOYEE TO EMPLOYEE. of attack prevention, security awareness training, roaming web security tied to email efficacy, brand exploitation protection, threat remediation and Business Continuity.” Times are changing: The threats you can’t see impacting your brand This latest research comes at a time when organisations across the globe have been forced to adopt remote work policies for employees in response to the Coronavirus pandemic. Threat actors have seized this www.intelligentcio.com INTELLIGENTCIO 25