As organizations across the globe embrace new paradigms of working, the adoption of new cloud tools, storage solutions, and collaborative services have skyrocketed. 

Threat actors are leveraging this trend and extending their attack toolkits to these new apps and services, while continuing to threaten the web and email. Consequently, organizations are experiencing increasing rates of attacks across all attack vectors, along with high incident response costs.

As a result, security leaders are planning to deploy new solutions to address the changing threat landscape.

Osterman Research’s latest white paper highlights how expanding threats are impacting enterprises’ bottom lines. With the frequency and sophistication of cybersecurity incidents only expected to increase, these findings emphasize the urgent need for organizations to adopt the most effective cybersecurity solutions.

In this blog post, we review the main takeaways of, “The Rise of Cyber Threats Against Email, Browsers, and Emerging Cloud-Based Channels,” by Osterman Research. Keep reading to learn more.

The rapid adoption of new channels

It is no surprise that today’s organizations rely on an increasing number of channels in their daily workflows and processes. In fact, Osterman Research found that 50% of the organizations surveyed currently use more than six channels for communication and collaboration for use internally and when working with third-party vendors.

According to the report, 80% of enterprise IT and security experts believe new channels, including cloud collaboration apps and web browsers, will be crucial for employee productivity by 2024. While these tools will certainly create a more productive work environment, their proliferation increases the number of attack vectors and creates more potential vulnerabilities for threat actors to leverage.

Sophisticated threats are accelerating

The report found that malicious incidents against newer cloud-based apps and services already occur at 60% of the frequency they do against emails – although email has been around far longer. Some cloud app attacks, like those involving malware installed on an endpoint, occur at 87% of the frequency of email-based services. If these trends continue, such sophisticated threats on newer cloud apps may  surpass more traditional attacks on email services.

The cost of security

Many cybersecurity incidents lead to costly, time-consuming incident response processes capable of significantly draining an organization’s resources. 

Osterman Research found that, on average, enterprises pay $1,197 per employee per year to address cyber incidents across email, cloud collaboration services, and web browsers. This figure excludes compliance fines and lawsuits from data and privacy breaches, wider ransomware mitigation costs, and business losses from non-operational business processes.

According to the report research, an incident detected on cloud collaboration apps takes 71 hours on average to resolve, while an email-based cyber breach takes an average of 86 hours to address. An individual security professional can only handle 23 email incidents per year, representing a direct cost of $6,452 per incident in that professional’s hours alone. For cloud app incidents, the rate is 28 incidents per year at an average cost of $5,305 per incident. If amplified throughout the enterprise, these numbers can snowball, incurring massive costs.

Don’t fall behind

This report demonstrates the growing frequency and sophistication of cybersecurity incidents in the wake of expanding threat landscapes. 

There is an urgent need for organizations to employ the most efficient cybersecurity solutions as traditional tools become obsolete against increasingly sophisticated threats. Enterprises must seek out next-gen cybersecurity tools to help manage these growing threats and mitigate the potential damage they may cause.

At Perception Point, our cloud-native platform has been designed to operate seamlessly within the modern organization’s diverse  environment, preventing the most advanced threats from reaching the end-user remediating threats and updating defensive algorithms across all protected systems. In other words, identified vulnerabilities are plugged and patches uploaded for all Perception Point customers, allowing security teams to stay ahead of the increasingly dynamic threat landscape. 

For more information, download the full report here: The Rise of Cyber Threats Against Email, Browsers and Emerging Cloud-based Channels

Don’t miss our upcoming webinar with Osterman Research’s Senior Analyst, Michael Sampson, and Perception Point’s VP Corporate Development & Strategy, Michael Calev. They will discuss the effects of the changing threat landscape and what organizations must do to bolster security protections for their channels. Register here: Up in the Cloud, The New Threat Landscape: Email, Browsers & Cloud Channels