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Two out of every five companies have suffered (or have suffered) from theft of Microsoft Office 365 user data. This is despite the fact that 80 percent of the companies surveyed used more than just the standard Office security measures.

Despite the fact that cloud-based services promise better data security than traditional services, a survey of 5,000 employees at 300 companies in the United Kingdom and the United States found that the number of stolen Office user data is incredibly high. Cyren and Osterman Research, the research agency that produced the results, reports that on average 3.7 times per organisation user data ended up in the wrong place.

According to the study, it takes a lot of time for companies to recover from these types of data problems: an average of 133 hours is spent on tasks such as recovering user data, finding security weaknesses and reporting problems to the staff. The manual deletion of malicious e-mails happened on average 6.5 times a month, which takes about 15 minutes per e-mail.

Additional security measures

Despite additional security measures taken by four out of five companies, 71 percent of the companies surveyed indicated that they had been exposed to malware infections via e-mail (no ransomware). An average of 7.2 in the last year indicates how common this type of attack is. In addition, 30 percent of respondents had ransomware attacks, with an overall average of nearly one attack per company in the last year. In addition, 48 percent of the companies surveyed reported phishing emails, with an average of just over one case per quarter.

It may be said that the geographical spread of the study cannot be replicated on a 1:1 basis for other locations, but the figures from the study do underline the importance of comprehensive security measures when using Office 365 to prevent data theft and successful malware attacks.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.