43% of Global Employees Are Not Sure What a Phishing Attack Is

• Employees want to keep working remotely but admit they are not as productive as in the office
• A third of remote workers consider IT security a low priority
• Almost half of global employees don’t fully understand the notion of a phishing attack

As employees increasingly use their personal devices to access corporate data, IT departments are faced with an array of security challenges. Worse, many remote workers don’t even consider IT security a priority.

The results of MobileIron’s study paint a grim picture for organizations worldwide, if they must rely on a remote workforce accessing corporate data from anywhere.

The first finding noted by the firm is that 80% of global employees do not want to return to the office full-time. This, even though one in three employees admitted that isolation from their team was the biggest hindrance to productivity during lockdown. So, already remote workers are off on the wrong foot. But it gets worse.

Employees are not prioritizing security

The study found that 33% of workers consider IT security a low priority. In other words, many remote workers can’t be bothered to obey their employer’s security protocols. These findings are somewhat echoed in similar recent studies, like one published by DTEX Systems last week noting a 450% increase in employees circumventing security controls to hide online activities.

Yet MobileIron researchers found even more worrying signs. Their poll of 1,200 workers in the US, UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand revealed that an alarming 43% of global employees are not sure what a phishing attack is – phishing being the main attack vector in most cyber incidents today.

“The current distributed remote work environment has also triggered a new threat landscape, with malicious actors increasingly targeting mobile devices with phishing attacks,” the researchers said. “These attacks range from basic to sophisticated and are likely to succeed, with many employees unaware of how to identify and avoid a phishing attack.”

Security solutions that embody human risk analytics enable IT administrators to act with surgical precision, tweaking the right security controls when and where they are needed, and deploying training for staff with a poor grasp on IT security. Learn more here.