Banking and finance have best security culture


By Dylan Bushell-Embling
Friday, 09 April, 2021

Banking and finance have best security culture

Banking and financial services are the industries with the highest security culture globally, according to new research from Knowbe4.

An industry benchmark completed by the company found that although no industry has yet reached the standard of being considered to have a good security culture (represented by an index score of at least 80), banking and finance came closest with a score of 76.

The technology, insurance and consultancy industries are not far behind, achieving a benchmark score of 75, with health care and pharmaceuticals as well as business services achieving a score of 74.

At the other end of the scale, the education and construction sectors are faring worse with scores of 70 apiece, followed by government, energy and utilities, manufacturing, retail and wholesale, and transportation at 71.

The report found that organisations with a poor security culture have employees that are 52 times more likely to share security credentials than those with a good security culture.

Across all industries, 20% of respondents indicated that they are not receiving enough training on information security, 23% said they stored some of their passwords on their device, and 12% indicated that they didn’t understand why it is important to regularly change passwords.

Meanwhile only 57% of respondents indicated that they would notice if their computer is compromised, and 30% indicated that it is difficult to reach IT support within their organisation.

“With this annual study, we aim to provide the most comprehensive study of cybersecurity culture-related data,” KnowBe4 Research Managing Director Kai Roer said.

“The Security Culture Report takes a unique approach to evaluating security culture using seven different dimensions across a wide variety of industries. Of course, the pandemic has created some shifts in security culture when compared year over year. It will be interesting to continue to track how certain vertical industries change over time when it comes to their security culture.”

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/kras99

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