Security outfit Sophos has been asking around and found that nearly all organisations find essential security operation tasks, such as threat hunting a bit too challenging.
Sophos’s new survey The State of Cybersecurity 2023: The Business Impact of Adversaries on Defenders which found that, globally, 93 per cent of organisations find the execution of some essential security operation tasks, such as threat hunting, challenging.
These challenges include understanding how an attack happened, with 75 per cent of respondents stating they have challenges identifying the root cause of an incident. This can make proper remediation difficult, leaving organizations vulnerable to repetitive or multiple attacks, by the same or different adversaries, especially since 71 per cent of those surveyed also reported challenges with timely remediation.
More than 71 per cent said they have challenges understanding which signals/alerts to investigate, and the same percent reported challenges prioritising investigations.
Sophos CTO John Shier said that only a fifth of respondents considered vulnerabilities and remote services a top cybersecurity risk for 2023, yet the ground truth is that these are routinely exploited by Active Adversaries.
“This cascade of operational issues means that these organizations aren’t seeing the full picture and are potentially acting on incorrect information. There’s nothing worse than being confidently wrong. Having external audits and monitoring helps eliminate blind spots. We can look at you the way an attacker does,” he said.
Additional findings include:
- 52 per cent of organizations surveyed said that cyberthreats are now too advanced for their organisation to deal with on their own
- 64 per cent wish the IT team could spend more time on strategic issues and less time on firefighting, and 55 per cent said that the time spent on cyberthreats has impacted the IT team’s work on other projects.
- While 94 per cent said they are working with external specialists to scale their operations, the majority still remain involved with managing threats rather than taking a fully outsourced approach
“Today’s threats require a timely and coordinated response. Unfortunately, too many organizations are stuck in reactive mode. Not only is this having an impact on core business priorities, but it also has a sizeable human toll, with over half of respondents stating that cyberattacks are keeping them up at night. Eliminating the guesswork and applying defensive controls based on actionable intelligence will let IT teams focus on enabling the business instead of trying to douse the eternal flame of active attacks,” said Shier.
Data from The State of Cybersecurity 2023: The Business Impact of Adversaries on Defenders comes from an independent study of 3,000 leaders responsible for IT/cybersecurity across 14 countries conducted in January and February 2023.
