Sophos, a leader in innovating and delivering cybersecurity as a service, published its The State of Cybersecurity 2023: The Business Impact of Adversaries on Defenders that found that, globally, 93 percent of organizations find the execution of some essential security operation tasks, such as threat hunting, challenging. These include understanding how an attack happened, with 75 percent of respondents stating they have challenges identifying the root cause of an incident. This can make proper remediation difficult, leaving organizations vulnerable to repetitive and/or multiple attacks, by the same or different adversaries, especially since 71 percent of those surveyed also reported challenges with timely remediation.
In addition, 71 percent said they have challenges understanding which signals/alerts to investigate, and the same percentage reported challenges prioritizing investigations.
“Only one 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,” said John Shier, field CTO, commercial, Sophos.
Additional findings include:
- 52 percent of organizations surveyed said that cyber threats are too advanced for their organization to deal with on their own
- 64 percent wish the IT team could spend more time on strategic issues and less time on firefighting, and 55 percent said that the time spent on cyber threats has impacted the IT team’s work on other projects
- While 94 percent 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.
To learn more about The State of Cybersecurity 2023: The Business Impact of Adversaries on Defenders, download the report from Sophos.com.
More information is available at www.sophos.com.
