New Zscaler Report Shows Many Organizations Fear VPN Risks

Zscaler, one of the leaders in cloud security, has just published the results of its research regarding VPN management, user experience, potential cyberattack risks, and more.

The numbers showed that many organizations are currently concerned about security due to VPN vulnerabilities.

Biggest VPN concerns

Zscaler published its annual VPN Risk Report on August 1. 382 IT and cybersecurity professionals from various fields took part in the survey.

One of the main problems researchers discovered is that many organizations are concerned about their network security due to VPN use. 

88% of participants said they fear potential breaches due to virtual private network vulnerabilities. VPN threats they are scared of the most are phishing (49%) and ransomware attacks (40%).

Malware infections are at the third spot with 33% of organizations viewing them as the most dangerous.

Close to 50% of organizations said cybercriminals targeted them after exploiting issues such as outdated protocols and data leaks. About 20% faced this problem in the past year.

90% are concerned about hackers gaining backdoor access into their networks through third-party vendors. This is mostly because security standards and practices vary between companies.

Security isn’t the only problem Zscaler’s report discovered. Many organizations aren’t happy about their current VPN experience.

72% of organizations cited slow and unreliable connections to be another major issue. 25% are dissatisfied with application speeds while 21% said they experience frequent disconnections.

16% said their major issue are inconsistencies between VPN apps across different devices.

Only 9% reported increasing VPN infrastructure costs to be their biggest headache.

Organizations that think VPN use will cause further security issues said they see the importance of adopting a Zero Trust approach.

Additional questions

Survey participants also answered some additional questions regarding their VPN use.

84% of organizations said they use a VPN to enable access to company assets for remote workers. Only 11% use it for unmanaged devices.

Zscaler said the latter could point to an area of vulnerability that many are overlooking.

Although some are concerned about VPN risks, 70% of organizations said they use a virtual private network daily.