Security professionals rate phishing as top threat

The survey questioned security and IT professionals globally on the threats their organisations face today. The result show how cyber criminals continue to target individual employees within businesses to gain access to sensitive information. When it comes to impact, phishing causes the most damage, and 40% of survey respondents experienced phishing attacks, including spearphishing and whaling in 2016.

Almost one-third of respondents have experienced a malware-less threat entering their organisation, impacting IT systems and adding to IT staff workload. Scripting attacks were the most common malware-less incident, while credential compromise or privilege escalation caused the most impact. Few of the threats were new zero-day threats, on the other hand, with 76% of security professionals admitting that under 10% of the significant threats they saw were zero-day.

While users are the primary target of these attacks, the users themselves are also part of the solution. In the survey, 37% of respondents indicated that calls to the help desk helped them discover the most impactful threats.

The full results of the 2017 Threat Landscape survey will be released on August 15, 2017.