Jane Edwards
A report commissioned by Tenable and developed by Ponemon Institute says 88 percent of information security professionals in the public sector said they have experienced at least one damaging cyber breach in the last two years.
The relentlessness of cyber attacks in the public sector was one of the five points of the report discussed by Stephen Smith, manager of state and local business development at Tenable, and Larry Ponemon, Ponemon chairman and founder, during a webinar, Tenable said Wednesday.
The study showed that 65 percent of respondents said they are concerned about the likelihood of cyber attacks involving operational technology and internet-of-things assets in 2019 and only 23 percent said they have sufficient visibility into their agencies’ attack surface.
Forty-four percent of respondents said they prioritize cyber threats based on the ease of remediation, while 50 percent noted that they attempt to measure the cost of downtime associated with OT assets. The report is based on the responses of 244 infosec professionals from public sector organizations in the U.S., Australia, Germany, Japan, Mexico and the U.K.
During the webinar, Ponemon and Smith called on public sector cyber professionals to identify ways to enhance their vulnerability prioritization, advance passive monitoring and implement vulnerability assessment and continuous asset discovery in order to address the cyber exposure gap.
