85% of security professionals believe technology can't prevent attacks

Attacks Infections Bromium
Who's watching your data?

Almost 85% of information security professionals believe their existing technology can't prevent endpoint infections, according to the results of a survey conducted by Bromium. Roughly the same number of respondents say they believe anti-virus solutions are unable to prevent against targeted attacks.

The survey, "Endpoint Protection: Attitudes and Opinions," reveals that 72% of respondents say end users are their biggest security concern. Sixty-five percent of information security professionals are actively searching for endpoint protection that can stop known and unknown threats.

The past 12 months have featured a string of notorious breaches and bugs - none more prevalent than the Heartbleed Bug, which infected software used by millions of web servers, retailers, operating systems, email and instant messaging services, and Target's point-of-sale breach, which exposed 70 million customer credit and debit cards numbers, as well as customer names, mailing addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers.

Cybercrime costs businesses roughly $445 billion (about £350bn, AUD 469bn) annually, according to research from McAfee.

With new initiatives, such as the Internet of Things, causing businesses to adopt new forms of technology, threats are expected to increase. For example, 70% of IT decision-makers at small-to-mid-size businesses do not believe the C-Suite will increase IT spending to provide them with the resources necessary to tackle additional security problems created by the Internet of Things, according to a survey conducted by Opinion Matters for GFI Software.

Fear is prevalent across all verticals. IDC Financial Insights projects worldwide risk information technologies and services spending in the financial sector to increase 22% from $79 billion to $97.3 billion by 2018. The report, Worldwide IT Spending 2013-2018, predicts risk information technology in financial services will account for 18.2% of the projected $530 billion in overall IT spending by 2018.

This spring, a survey conducted by business software company Ipswitch, revealed 63% of IT professionals are frustrated with current file transfer processes and 40% believe manual file transfer processes are inefficient.

The Bromium research features responses from more than 300 information security professionals. Results of the survey were validated in an independent NSS Labs Test Report.