The source of the best cybersecurity threats to the U.S. public sector is foreign governments, supplanting the final hacking community, in response to a brand new report by the knowledge technology (IT) company SolarWinds [SWI].
The corporate’s eighth annual Public Sector Cybersecurity Report says that 60 percent of respondents identified foreign governments topping the threat list, up from 47 percent in 2021. Careless and untrained insiders are seen by 58 percent of respondents as the highest threat to their organization’s IT systems and 52 percent identified the final hacking community as the best threat within the 2023 report, which was released on May 9.
Since 2014, the highest three sources of cybersecurity threats have remained the identical for federal IT professionals and since 2019 for the state, local and education respondents.
The survey obtained 400 responses from IT operations and security decisionmakers, including 200 federal, 100 state and native, and 100 education respondents. Personnel from federal civilian agencies made up 29 percent of respondents, the Defense Department 19 percent, and intelligence agencies 2 percent.
The survey also sought response on obstacles to improving IT security, with 27 percent saying that the complexity of their internal environment is the hardest challenge, up from 15 percent in 2021, while 26 percent said budget constraints are the largest hurdle. The newest survey marks the primary time that IT complexity surpassed budget constraints as the first obstacle in boosting a company’s cybersecurity posture.
There may be increasing awareness that zero-trust architectures are essential to a company’s cybersecurity, with a record 90 percent believing zero-trust must be implemented. The survey says that 85 percent of respondents—up from 78 percent in 2021—use a proper or informal zero-trust approach to IT security.
As for the largest IT security threats, 58 percent of respondents put spam at the highest of the list. Ransomware continues to be a priority, although only 32 percent of federal respondents put it at the highest versus 41 percent for state and native governments.