Sectigo, a leading provider of digital certificates and automated digital certificate management, announced initial findings and themes from its PKI Risk Assessment Tool, which launched in Q4 2020. According to results, Application Development, Cloud Key Management, and Networked Devices rank as the top three high-risk use cases for respondents. Designed to help enterprises assess their exposure to essential security risks, the tool provides IT and cybersecurity professionals with a custom report that scores the risk level and prescriptive analytics for eight individual Private Key Infrastructure (PKI) use cases.
PKI plays a critical role in securing many use cases across today’s modern enterprise. It has evolved to become even more versatile, harnessing automation, orchestration, scalability, crypto-agility, and visibility. The high-risk use cases related to Application Development, Cloud Key Management, and Networked Devices revealed that a lack of public and private certificates or even appropriate certificate management processes left opportunities for malicious hackers to capitalize. Either in the form of false malware-laden applications or website outages, weak identity protection in one instance can mean significant impacts across the business.
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“Having PKI deployed does not mean that a business is secure or that digital certificate lifecycles are managed properly,” said Tim Callan, Chief Compliance Officer at Sectigo. “A stronger approach to automated certificate management means less risk and greater control of the digital certificates used across the network. Assessing that risk provides businesses with the tools necessary to close up any holes in their overall strategy to protect against cyberattacks and sudden failure of critical systems.”
As part of more in-depth analysis, Sectigo found the following risk levels from the Risk Assessment Reports after the questionnaires were completed by IT professionals for their respective organizations. Note that these findings are reflective of those respondents who selected the categories as a risk, to begin with:
- Application Development:
- 71% of respondents who selected the application development use case are at high risk
- Cloud Key Management:
- 70% of respondents who selected the cloud key management use case are at high risk
- Networked Devices:
- 68% of respondents who selected the networked devices use case are at high risk
- Web Servers:
- 67% of respondents who selected the web server use case are at high risk
- Email:
- 61% of respondents who selected the email use case are at high risk
- DevOps Environment:
- 50% of respondents who selected the DevOps use case are at high risk
- IoT Devices:
- 52% of respondents who selected the IoT devices use case are at high risk
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As PKI remains the gold standard in digital certificate management, Sectigo’s PKI Risk Assessment Tool helps enterprises future-proof their cryptography, reduce the risk of outages or breaches, and keep security standards high.
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