IT unwilling to bet against hackers, says study

Lieberman Software provides identity and security management products worldwide.
The survey was conducted in February at the 2013 RSA conference where the attitudes of IT security and the way their organizations manage cyber security was analyzed. Roughly 50 per cent of respondents work in organizations with more than 1,000 people.

About one third of organizations haven’t implemented policy making it mandatory to change default passwords when installing new hardware, applications and network appliances to the corporate network, according to the study.
Philip Lieberman, President and CEO of Lieberman Software, comments on the research found.

“…Most organizations are woefully unprotected against cyber attacks,” he says. “While vendors of conventional security products – like firewalls and anti-virus – are constantly updating their tools to reactively protect against the latest threats, hackers are looking for flaws and engineering new attacks to exploit them. The reality is that 100% protection is nearly impossible to achieve, but there are still best practices for securing access to critical systems and data that many organizations tend to ignore.

“IT departments that do not have a solution in place to automatically detect, flag and change default privileged passwords on newly deployed systems are neglecting a very common security hole,” he adds.