Compromised credentials are still the cause of almost a quarter of all data breaches, according to a new survey by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), an organization that provides education and best practices for cloud security.
The study, sponsored by security technology provider Centrify, showed that of those respondents who indicated their company reported a data breach, 22% noted that the breach was due to compromised credentials. In addition, 65% of respondents said the likelihood their company would experience a future breach due to compromised credentials was medium to high.
There were no significant differences in security solutions used between respondents who reported a breach and those who either did not report or did not know of a reported breach in their organizations. Companies embracing big data technologies consistently adopted more perimeter and identity security products, and 76% of internal access control policies extended to outsourced IT, vendors and other third parties, the report said.
“The survey results are insightful into understanding insufficient identity, credential and access management, as it relates to the evolving, increasingly cloud-based enterprise,” said Luciano Santos, executive vice president of research for the CSA. “We hope that organizations and cloud providers can use this information to help gain an understanding of how to protect themselves and their data beyond the perimeter, as they begin to adopt cloud environments.”
