Security professionals in Europe experience a high workload due to e-mail attacks. Investigating their fraudulent nature takes a long time. 7 percent of EU security teams receive more than 50 suspicious emails a day, while 32 percent receive between 6 and 50 of these emails every day.
Barracuda’s global survey among 660 IT security professionals working in organisations with 100 to 5,000 employees reveals this.
According to the survey, only 10 percent of suspicious emails are actually fraudulent. Still, there is a lot of time in the research into the harmfulness of emails. For example, eight out of ten respondents claim that investigating an email attack, including taking any action, takes an average of more than 30 minutes. Nearly half (47%) even say they spend more than an hour investigating an e-mail attack.
Stress
High work pressure means more stress. Almost four in ten IT professionals surveyed say they suffer from this. What’s more, it doesn’t stop at the end of the working day, given that 38 percent of the respondents said they were worried about e-mail attacks outside working hours as well, while as many as 16 percent have cancelled private appointments because of such an attack.
What’s more, damage to reputation also causes a lot of stress. Organisations in Europe are reported to have suffered more (39%) image damage in the past year than the global average (27%).
Poor security
The generally poor security of the organisation is also a source of stress. For example, only 52 percent of European respondents believe that security has improved over the past year. Globally, the average is 63 percent.
Furthermore, the research shows that organisations in Europe are most likely to fall victim to a spearphish attack. At least 48 percent of the respondents said they had experienced such an attack in the past year.
Increased risk of burn-out
All this, together with the combination of a strongly increasing demand for security expertise, and a growing shortage of people with this type of expertise, makes it more likely that these employees in particular will drop out more often with stress-related complaints; with all consequences this has for the quality of service and thus for the continuity of the company.
16 hours ago
