The University of Derby today confirmed it is using Avecto Privilege Guard to effectively manage their end user privileges.  Their IT support team needed to manage and minimise the risks posed by users when downloading unknown applications, as well as ensuring compatibility with other incumbent applications, and ensuring licensing conformity. Users’ administrator rights have been removed and instead applications are now elevated within Privilege Guard as and when required. This has resulted in a dramatic drop in virus and Trojan outbreaks.

More than 1 in 4 security professionals said that top executives or other privileged users in their enterprises have been compromised by spear phishing attacks within the last 12 months. That’s according to a survey by PhishMe of 250 IT professionals at the Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas last month which found that most email recipients are not properly trained to recognize or safely react to them.

 Two out of three security professionals say that their staff are being phished relentlessly, throughout the working week as their anti-spam filters are unable to catch the messages.    Almost a quarter of the respondents said they see such messages in users’ mailboxes multiple times every day.

SecurEnvoy says results of latest survey on lack of software update security understanding is not as bleak as it first sounds

 “We, as an industry, have to develop easy-to-use security that is as foolproof as possible,”

-- Steve Watts, SecurEnvoy

 Commenting on results of a US survey that found almost half of consumers are failing to update their software regularly, SecurEnvoy says this highlights the fact that there are lot of consumers out there who don’t know – and probably don’t really care – how their computers work.

“Most organisations fall into the trap of giving their staff virtually complete access to the firm’s information – including company and customer confidential data – and so creating their very own data vulnerability.” Paul Kenyon, COO, Avecto

Commenting on UKFast’s claims regarding potentially serious public sector data leaks which the hosting provider discovered when using Google’s search engine, Avecto says that the unintended data breaches are almost certainly the result of too many people having the ability to access personal information.