BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, ObserveIT, the leader in user activity monitoring, and the Ponemon Institute released “What You Don’t Know Will Hurt You: A Study of the Risk from Application Access and Usage,” which examines the security risks and threats associated with application access and usage.
The study surveyed 610 U.S. IT and IT security practitioners, seventy-nine percent of which have responsibility for detecting and/or investigating instances of suspicious user activities within the organization.
The study reveals why user access and behavior is a growing and unaddressed business risk:
- Audits and formal assessments reveal deficiencies in monitoring application access and usage, according to over 70 percent of respondents.
- 71 percent of breaches were caused by application users, with only 18 percent stemming from privileged users.
- Only eight percent of respondents say their organizations have deployed commercial auditing and monitoring solutions to monitor access and usage of applications.
- Monitoring is mainly done by ad hoc, manual or homegrown systems that focus only on privileged users.
- Current monitoring capabilities are unable to detect risky user behavior and 45 percent of respondents give them very low marks.
“This report clearly shows that everyday application usage and unintended actions are one of the biggest unaddressed risks challenging security teams today” said Paul Brady, CEO of ObserveIT. “ObserveIT’s ability to monitor and alert on the usage and access of business critical applications has proven to be extremely valuable in detecting and preventing security incidents from occurring.”
“Through this study we have proven that business users are often not as security conscious as IT administrators and as a result put regulated and sensitive data at risk,” said Larry Ponemon, Chairman and Founder of the Ponemon Institute. “Leveraging a service or technology to monitor access and usage with applications will become a mainstay as organizations look to prevent breaches and meet ever increasing regulatory requirements.”
About ObserveIT
ObserveIT is the world’s leading provider of user behavior monitoring software that detects and alerts on abnormal behavior to prevent insider risks from becoming insider threats. ObserveIT reduces data misuse and unauthorized data access, accelerates forensics investigations, and cuts internal security audit efforts in half.
ObserveIT’s user recording technology captures all user activity across all applications, even applications without logs, and creates user activity logs making it easy to search, analyze, and audit user behavior. ObserveIT has more than 1,200 customers in over 70 countries.
To learn more visit: www.observeit.com or find us on Twitter @ObserveIT.
About Ponemon
Ponemon Institute conducts independent research on privacy, data protection and information security policy. Our goal is to enable organizations in both the private and public sectors to have a clearer understanding of the trends in practices, perceptions and potential threats that will affect the collection, management and safeguarding of personal and confidential information about individuals and organizations. Ponemon Institute research informs organizations on how to improve upon their data protection initiatives and enhance their brand and reputation as a trusted enterprise.
