Specops Software discovered that 41% of employees had not been provided with adequate cybersecurity training while working from home, and they were keen to discover which sectors were experiencing the most threats during this time. They found that 54% of businesses across 11 sectors have seen a rise in cybercrime threats since working from home, with phishing being the most prevalent attack.

The year 2020 isn’t over yet, but so far, it’s been unprecedented from a threat landscape point of view – including the impact of the global pandemic and social movements on the cybersecurity landscape. The threat researchers at FortiGuard Labs have taken a good hard look at what was happening over the first six months of 2020 from a cybersecurity perspective, and we’ve identified some key trends that the industry needs to be aware of.

The cybersecurity skills crisis continues to worsen for the fourth year in a row and has impacted nearly three quarters (70 percent) of organizations, as revealed in the fourth annual global study of cybersecurity professionals by the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) and independent industry analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).

The US Senate passed a bipartisan amendment to the FY 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to require the Department of Homeland Security to establish a Cybersecurity State Coordinator position in every state.

Obstacles including budget concerns, time constraints, stubborn company culture, or a lack of cybersecurity best practices can seem overwhelming, especially to a smaller organization with limited resources. Fortunately, there are reasonable solutions to each of these roadblocks that can help all organizations be more secure.

The number of devices connected to the internet is expected to reach 50 billion worldwide by the end of 2030, posing dangerous risks to people, businesses and critical systems.

The number of records exposed for Q1 2020 skyrocketed to 8.4 billion –  a 273 percent increase compared to Q1 2019. 

Preventing identity-based attacks such as account takeover (ATO) fraud and Business Email Compromise (BEC) begins with securing your personally identifiable information (PII), but this seems to be increasingly difficult as cybercriminals continue to evolve.

The number of new identity records and the depth of personal information available in exfiltrated data are expanding, creating a blueprint of digital identities that threat actors can weaponize and expose identity information.

New KnowBe4 study, The Rise of Security Culture, finds that the majority of security leaders (94 percent) say security culture is important for business success, but have yet to merge their security strategies with their overall business strategies.