FILIPINO security leaders believe that the use of unregistered devices for hybrid work has the tendency to cause cybersecurity incidents—including malware, phishing, and data leaks—and has in fact cost some organizations as much as $500,000, a recent study conducted by Cisco revealed.
According to Cisco’s latest report titled, “My Location, My Device: Hybrid Work’s New Cybersecurity Challenge,” more than 8 in 10 security professionals in the Philippines believe their employees are using unregistered devices to log into work platforms. About 75 percent say their employees spend more than 10 percent of the day working from these unregistered devices.
The study further found that 89 percent of respondents in the Philippines believe that logging in remotely via unregistered devices has increased the likelihood of occurrence of cybersecurity incidents.
But it’s not just the device that they believe could cause breaches. Using public Internet may also cause cybersecurity incidents, according to Cisco. About 91 percent of respondents in the Philippines say their employees use at least two networks for logging into work, and 47 percent said their employees use more than five networks.
“As hybrid work becomes the norm, companies are empowering their employees to work from anywhere. While this has brought many benefits, it is also opening new challenges, especially on the cybersecurity front, as hackers can now target employees beyond traditional corporate network perimeters. To make hybrid work truly successful in the long run, organizations need to protect their business with security resilience. This includes establishing visibility on their networks, users, endpoints, and applications to acquire insights into access behaviors, leveraging these insights to detect threats, and harnessing threat intelligence to respond against them on-premises or in the cloud,” Cisco Asean Director for Cybersecurity Juan Huat Koo said.
The use of unregistered devices is adding a new layer of challenge for security professionals with 77 percent of Filipino respondents experiencing at least one cybersecurity incident—malware, phishing, or data leaks—in the past 12 months.
Among those who suffered an incident, 69 percent said it cost them at least $100,000, and 38 percent said it cost them at least $500,000.
Furthermore, cybersecurity incidents are “likely to disrupt” businesses for as short as a year to as long as two years.
Given this scenario, 87 percent of security leaders in the Philippines expect their organization to increase its cybersecurity budget by more than 10 percent over the next year, and 95 percent expect upgrades to IT infrastructure in the next two years.
“In a digital-first hybrid world, cybersecurity threats not only impact IT, but also financial, operational, organizational, and supply chain practices. With hybrid work here to stay, it is crucial that Filipino organizations relook their overall IT and security strategy to ensure that resilience is interwoven into the fabric of their business from the network to the endpoint and the cloud edge. People are a cornerstone of fostering this resilience. Organizations need to educate their people on the challenges that unregistered devices and unsecured connections pose to compromised credentials and cyber threats,” Cisco Philippines Managing Director Zaza Nicart said.
The report surveyed 6,700 security professionals from 27 countries, including 150 security professionals from the Philippines.