Three in every four respondents admitted to reusing passwords across accounts. In the survey's 2014 edition, the same was true for "only 56% of the employees."
Cybersecurity-habits-stats
The generation that has grown up with technology and might therefore be expected to know better fares even worse in this department: no fewer than 87% of people aged 18-25 duplicate their passwords, including nearly one-half who do so across personal and work accounts.
In addition, 31% of the respondents admitted to having deployed software without the authorisation of their respective organisations IT department in a practice dubbed "shadow IT" – an increase from 20% in 2014. Such willingness to skirt considerations of security, across all age groups, was largely attributed to workers' efforts to boost their work efficiency.
A sense of disconnect between the employees and the IT teams is also seen in that more than one-half (55%) of the respondents said that their organisation's IT department can be a source of inconvenience.
In fact, 13% of employees admitted they would not immediately alert their IT team should they think that they had been hacked. Indeed, nearly the same share (49%) of employees said that they would blame the IT department for a cyberattack if it occurred as a result of an employee being hacked.
"Even in the absence of malicious intentions, however, intentionally skimping on security adds to the range of myriad risks that not only large organisations face at present," says Carey van Vlaanderen, CEO at ESET South Africa. "This is unfolding against the backdrop of challenges introduced by ongoing digital transformation and efforts of businesses to keep up with the requirement of today's digital era."
This article was published in partnership with ESET.
