Failure to Detect a Breach May Wreak Havoc in Corporate IT Infrastructures, CISOs Say

Failure to detect an advanced cyberattack or a targeted threat as soon as it occurs may lead to full infrastructure compromise, irreversible data loss, and financial repercussions from which some companies may never recover, according to a Bitdefender survey of 1,050 CISOs in the US and Europe.

With attacks becoming more sophisticated, advanced, and pervasive, companies are left vulnerable by the traditional set it-and-forget it security model in which organizations and businesses acquire but don’t continuously manage security tools or update incident response plans.

The main consequence of being unaware of a breach while it is happening is business interruption, according to more than half of IT execs surveyed. Depending on the industry, these interruptions can have a significant impact on reputation, mainly if they lead to widespread media coverage or publicly expose customer data, or if they trigger direct financial losses, both mentioned by 44% of European and American CISOs.

Source: Bitdefender

Intellectual property loss, legal fines and penalties, or even job loss for those responsible for preventing the attack could also be side effects of late detection and not minimizing the dwell time of infections. As a result, 82% of companies have security tools, processes, and staff to detect and respond to advanced attacks. Two-thirds have this service as an in-house or do-it-yourself operating model while a quarter have opted for outsourced models. Using their current security tools, UK respondents think 63% of advanced attacks can be efficiently prevented, detected and isolated. This compares to 61% in the US, 60% in Italy, 58% in France and Sweden, 52% in Germany, and 44% in Denmark.

The survey, conducted in February-March 2018 by Censuswide for Bitdefender, included 1,050 IT security purchase professionals from large enterprises with 1,000+ PCs and data centers, based in the US and Europe. 250 respondents originate from the United States, while 154 are from Germany, 150 from the UK, France, and Italy each, 101 from Denmark, and 100 from Sweden.