94% of Organizations Experienced a Cyberattack in 2022
Almost all organizations experienced at least one cyberattack in the past 12 months, according to new research published by Sophos in its State of Cybersecurity 2023 Report. The findings come from an independent study of 3,000 leaders with responsibility for cybersecurity across 14 countries, including the United States. 94% of respondents said they had to deal with at least one cyberattack on their organization in the past 12 months.
Malicious actors are increasingly using automation and cybercrime-as-a-service offerings to conduct sophisticated cyberattacks at scale, and network defenders are finding it increasingly difficult to defend against these threats. The problem has been compounded by a shortage of expertise due to the global lack of cybersecurity professionals.
The extent to which IT teams are having to investigate and respond to potential intrusions is limiting their ability to complete other IT projects and dedicate time to strategic projects, and IT teams are overworked and overwhelmed. The survey confirmed that IT teams feel they are constantly on the back foot and that they are unable to get ahead and proactively improve their defenses and reduce their workload. It is no surprise that 93% of respondents admitted that executing essential security operations was challenging.
The workload of security teams has become so great that there is simply not enough time to investigate all security alerts. 93% of respondents admitted to only investigating fewer than half of all security alerts that are generated about potential malicious activity, and 71% of organizations said they struggle to identify and prioritize the alerts and events to investigate. The time that must be devoted to investigating high-priority security alerts is considerable, with the full detection, investigation, and response process typically taking 9 hours for organizations with up to 3,000 employees and up to 15 hours for larger organizations. More than half of surveyed IT professionals think cyberthreats are now so sophisticated that they are unable to deal with the threats on their own, with 64% of small businesses feeling that way. Data exfiltration, phishing, ransomware, extortion, and DDoS attacks were the biggest security concerns for 2023, with the biggest security risk perceived to be security tool misconfiguration.
Get The FREE
HIPAA Compliance Checklist
Immediate Delivery of Checklist Link To Your Email Address
Please Enter Correct Email Address
Your Privacy Respected
HIPAA Journal Privacy Policy
It can be a struggle to get one step ahead of malicious actors, but the researchers suggest this is possible with a comprehensive, but straightforward approach that is focused on optimizing prevention, reducing exposure, and disrupting adversaries to buy defenders time to respond. Sophos recommends creating a scalable incident response process, minimizing the attack surface as far as possible, improving prioritization of the alerts that need to be investigated, and using specialist services to optimize the response time. The researchers recommend implementing adaptive defenses that are able to slow down adversaries to give network defenders time to respond. The last step is to “set up a virtuous cycle that combines technology and human expertise to turbo-charge defenses, enabling an increase in speed, efficacy, and impact. Together they accelerate the defender flywheel, enabling them to pull ahead.”
