Cyber attacks rose since enabling work-from-home setup, 44% of CISOs report

Cloud tools adopted for WFH selected as second most significant threat to organisations.

With the widespread adoption of the work-from-home setup, more companies have been exposed to cyber attacks in 2022, according to 44% of chief information security officers (CISOs) surveyed by cybersecurity company, Proofpoint.

The number of CISOs who observed cyber attacks in 2022 rose by 13% from 2021.

The adoption of WFH also led to companies installing cloud collaboration tools like Microsoft 365, Google Workspaces, etc, which was viewed by 33% of CISOs as the most significant threat targeting their organisation since its likely to be taken advantage of threat actors.

According to CISOs, most insider attacks are done by employees intentionally stealing company information.

Overall, however, cloud account compromise attacks only ranked as the second most significant threat behind distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) (37%), but ahead of smishing/vishing attacks (31%).

To counter these threats, 52% of CISOs said they had purchased
cyber insurance, whilst 48% focused on prevention over detection and response strategies.

Meanwhile, more than half (53%) of CISOs point to "human error" as the main reason why organisations are vulnerable to cyber threats. 

To address the lack of employees' cyber defence skills, about 51% of CISOs increased the frequency of cyber security training last year.

Overall, Singaporean CISOs (61%) are confident that their respective organisations prepare for targeted attacks in 2022.