According to a study, attackers can take over Office 365 accounts in most companies. Managers usually overestimate their own security skills.

71 percent of Office 365 accounts were successfully taken over by attackers in 2020 – and on average, companies were affected not just once, but seven times. The numbers come from a study by Vectra AI of 1,112 security experts and relate to medium and large companies.

Furthermore, only one in three people responsible believes that they can identify and stop such attacks immediately. Rather, the rest of them assume that it would take them days or even weeks to prevent account takeovers.

No practice, a lot of self-confidence

It is noticeable, however, that the management level has a significantly higher level of trust in their own defense skills than practical employees. Vectra AI assumes that such so-called account takeover attacks are among the methods favored by criminals.

Above all, conventional protective measures such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) want to bypass the attackers. According to the study, an MFA could slow down one’s own safety rather than support it.

Greater risk when using the cloud

Overall, respondents also believe that the threat has increased as data has been moved to the cloud. Above all, the time it takes to manage the security infrastructure is a nuisance to them, but the majority want to provide more financial resources in 2021.

The study was carried out by Sapio Research on behalf of Vectra AI. The results are available to iX, readers can download them by providing personal information.