Imperva research: Insiders are most often responsible for data loss in businesses

- Imperva survey also shows: IT security managers in businesses have significant concerns about Cloud Computing

- Correlation to IT Security Trends for 2011 from the Imperva Application Defense Center (ADC)

London, UK, 15^th December 2010 - According to a recent survey of 100 anonymous German IT security managers, conducted by Imperva and entitled "Application Data Protection"; many of the respondents saw insider threat as the biggest danger when it came to data loss within corporate networks (54 percent). Far fewer respondents took the chance to blame anyone at all (25 percent), and even less believed that hackers were primarily responsible for data theft incidents (21 percent). Another result showed that 70 percent of respondents were not planning to outsource mission-critical or sensitive data, as part of a cloud-project to an external service provider, over the next twelve months.

Dietmar Kenzle, Regional Sales Director DACH & Eastern Europe: “Employees within a company, that have privileged rights, i.e. the ‘insider’, are increasingly becoming the focus of IT security managers. The ability to directly access company databases is enough motivation to turn a regular employee into a potential criminal. The database server is the usual target for insider employees as it is a Bastion that is easy to take and also highly rewarding. To prevent sensitive data from falling into the wrong hands companies should be aware of possible scenarios and the methods of criminal insiders. Through the use of appropriate tools, for example, third party cloud providers, security compromises may be averted or at least mitigated."
Kenzle added: "Concerns of a different kind are evident in the transfer of sensitive data to the cloud. Certainly there will be common problems in the foreseeable future as current research shows that many companies are still skeptical about this step. Many perceive the risks in having all their information stored in a virtual stratum to be too great as it still remains to be seen which security mechanisms will provide the most reliable protection. The use of a web application firewall - especially in a third-party managed service - is an essential building block made within a security framework for the cloud."

What will IT security managers face in 2011?
The survey findings correlated with the latest IT security trends for 2011 which Imperva published in their annual report in November. Analysis of data security incidents by the Imperva Application Defense Center (ADC) in the past year showed that IT security managers will have to face 2011 with challenges in three key areas:

- The protection of mobile devices will play a more important role. Providing more complex identification and authentication solutions for mobile devices will become a particular area of focus due to the expected increase in the volume of mobile malware attacks.

- A late reaction. Companies will start to move part of their data storage and applications to the Cloud, culminating in the gradual establishment of Cloud-based data security solutions by the end of 2011.

- Possible increase in the State support of cyber-attacks such as Stuxnet will build on the concepts and techniques of the commercial hacking industry; thus an increase in unnoticed and ongoing spy networks (Advanced Persistent Threats (APT)) will be made possible.

Amichai Shulman, CTO of Imperva, said: "We expect, in the coming months, clearly different threat scenarios that will provide data security managers with a number of major challenges. The biggest potential danger is posed by the growing proliferation of advanced mobile devices used to access corporate networks. I expect that we will, next year, see the first major data security incident that will be caused by such high-risk devices. In addition, incidents which are based on advanced techniques for permanent spying networks will become an increasingly major problem to businesses - political and financial gain being the most prominent driving forces of these issues."

Imperva is the global leader in data security. With more than 1,200 direct customers and 25,000 cloud customers, Imperva’s customers include leading enterprises, government organizations, and managed service providers who rely on Imperva to prevent sensitive data theft from hackers and insiders. The award-winning Imperva SecureSphere is the only solution that delivers full activity monitoring for databases, applications and file systems.  For more information, visit www.imperva.com, follow us on Twitter or visit our blog.

Source: Eskenzi PR

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