A quarter of firms in MEA face dire cybersecurity skills gap

The confidence of IT managers and their approach to battling cyber attacks plummets after their organisation falls victim to ransomware, a new report by Sophos says.

The survey, ‘Cybersecurity: The Human Challenge’ says IT managers at organisations hit by ransomware are nearly three times as likely to feel “significantly behind” when it comes to understanding cyberthreats, compared to their peers in organisations that were unaffected (17 per cent versus 6 per cent).

More than one third (35 per cent) of ransomware victims said that recruiting and retaining skilled IT security professionals was their single biggest challenge when it comes to cybersecurity, compared with just 19 per cent of those who hadn’t been hit.

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When it comes to security focus, the survey found that ransomware victims spend proportionally less time on threat prevention (42.6 per cent) and more time on response (27 per cent) compared to those who haven’t been hit (49 per cent and 22 per cent respectively), diverting resources towards dealing with incidents rather than stopping them in the first place.

In the Middle East and Africa, 11 per cent of IT managers said they feel significantly behind when it comes to understanding cyberthreats.

More than a quarter of organisations, (26 per cent) who said that recruiting and retaining skilled cybersecurity professionals was their single biggest challenge when it came to cybersecurity.

In the region, security managers said they spent 44 per cent of their time focused on threat prevention while spending only 27 per cent of the time on response.