With the cybersecurity breach at Equifax top of mind on Wall Street, Mimecast chief Peter Bauer said employees are just as critical as technological security when it comes to protecting digital information.

“Particularly with email security, attackers have figured out that the human sitting behind the computer is one of the weakest links,” Bauer told “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer in an exclusive interview on Wednesday. “And what an attacker is really interested in is can they get a hold of credentials, could they deploy malware on that person’s machine, or could they get their help or cooperation in some way in launching an attack?”

Bauer is the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Mimecast, a cloud-based company specializing in email cybersecurity and management.

Besides putting an emphasis on employee education, his company develops technology to track imperfections in emails that could indicate a potential hack.

“There’s a large number of adversaries really interested in profiteering or sabotaging organizations digitally,” Bauer said. “We see a lot of what one would call ‘typo squatting,’ where domains have been registered that look quite similar to a domain that you would expect, but it’s actually not coming from the organization that you think it is.”

Bauer said Mimecast talks to management teams daily to make them aware of the scope of cyberattacks worldwide. The company recently secured a number of clients and partnerships after McAfee spun off from Intel in April of this year.

But with the Equifax hack threatening the information of 143 million customers, Bauer said more companies are beginning to wake up to the significance of securing their systems.

“It really does raise the issue of how seriously are boards taking cybersecurity?” the CEO said.

And as cyberattacks surge worldwide, new regulations like the European Union’s General Data Protection Rule are helping spread awareness to managements and boards, Bauer said.

“It’s a never-ending story, because as we innovate and develop more and more digital technologies that the world becomes reliant on, so vulnerabilities happen right behind them as technology changes,” the CEO said. “With new regulations like GDPR, for example, coming through in Europe, the size of the penalties to organizations is really significant. And so I think this is really raising the visibility for boards around cybersecurity.”

Source: Tech CNBC
Top cybersecurity CEO says hackers know humans, not computers, are 'weakest links'