73% of Hackers said traditional Firewall and Antivirus Security is irrelevant or obsolete.

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Fact: 73% of Hackers said traditional Firewall and Antivirus Security is irrelevant or obsolete.

“Humans are the most responsible for security breaches” – 80% of hackers say that for a reason.

A lot of misconfigurations found by hackers in the wild while performing assessments take place in such environments where Firewalls and Antivirus no longer pose a challenge for experienced hackers, but every business, needs to put their machines into real tests. Using methods like Phishing, Social Engineering, and Honeypots, malicious hackers gain direct access to user-privileged accounts, thereby easily passing through the various layers of security in place.

See Also: 7 out of 10 businesses are not prepared to respond to a Cyber Attack

When Thycotic, a provider of Privilege Management Security solutions, surveyed 250+ attendees at the Black Hat 2017 conference in Las Vegas, they found that 32% of hackers say accessing privileged accounts was the number one choice for the easiest and fastest way to get at sensitive data.

No matter how much you spend your budget on your building your infrastructure, hardware & software, each week a new exploit is being found that affects millions of businesses while many do not even patch up. That is when it comes to equipment costs. Social Engineering, is not new and is very effective. A hacker does not even need to touch your Firewalls or Protection if they target an employee that they see fit to attack, giving them access basically through their account while it can escalate to taking over all your network infrastructure.

See Also: 30M Dell Devices at Risk for Remote BIOS Attacks, RCE

Those that protect your company, should not be the same people that would test it. Penetration Testing is something that must be done, and the budget should be even set as a standard.

This is another wake-up call for organizations to bolster their Cyber Security efforts. In today’s ever-evolving threat environment, Offensive Security is absolutely critical for helping organizations sniff out cracks in their defenses before the bad guys do.

See Also: Hacking Stories: Andrian Lamo – The ‘homeless’ Hacker