Over half of InfoSec pros told to keep silent on breaches: report

Nearly 77% fear disabling weaponised tools over business disruption.

Over half of Singapore’s IT and security professionals who experienced an incident or breach in the past year were told to keep it confidential despite believing it should have been reported to authorities.

The figure stood at 53% for the city-state, compared with 55.2% globally, according to a Bitdefender report. 

Meanwhile, 76.6% said they would like to disable legitimate tools that attackers weaponise but fear doing so would disrupt business operations. 

Another 43.5% said they struggled to balance security restrictions with employee productivity.

Unauthorised cloud access was the top incident type reported over the past 12 months by 45% of respondents, followed by business email compromise (37%) and ransomware (28%).

The report also found gaps in visibility over employee use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, with only 48% of organisations reporting full visibility into sanctioned and unsanctioned AI usage. 

About half said they only had partial visibility, tracking official enterprise large language models but not individual Shadow AI subscriptions or personal accounts used for work. 

The Bitdefender report was based on an independent survey of more than 1,200 IT and security professionals across Singapore, France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and the US.

Respondents worked in companies with at least 500 employees and included cybersecurity practitioners and decision-makers.