News
Research from MIT Sloan Indicates Top CISO Priority is Enhancing Coverage for a Wide Variety of Attack Types and Surfaces
June 2020 by MIT Sloan
Attivo Networks® announced its participation with SINC and MIT Sloan on a research report entitled “The Cybersecurity Landscape: Challenges and How to Overcome Them.” The research differs from the Attivo Networks Top Threat Detection Trends Survey in that it was completed primarily with CISOs, CIOs and other security executives during the coronavirus pandemic, and priorities have changed with the shift to remote working.
With more people working from home, attacks that disrupt services or use credential theft are top concerns, along with the need to protect cloud architectures and critical access resources like Active Directory. Executives are prioritizing security investments that help them fight disruption of service and ensure compliance. A significant concern is ransomware, in part because business continuity and maintaining uptime are of utmost importance to keep operations running.
Additional insights in this report include:
• When asked about priorities to address in the next 12 months, more than 70% of the respondents chose detecting unknown and known attacks, detection across attack surfaces, and insider threats.
• Overall, businesses continue to struggle with reducing dwell time and their efficiency in responding to incidents. Recent reports still show average dwell time in days or months rather than minutes.
• The majority of respondents value deception technology for its comprehensive threat detection, highlighting the technology’s ability to detect any attack vector across any attack surface without relying on known behaviors or signatures. Following closely behind in value is deception’s ability to enable faster triage.
• It was not surprising to see traditional IPS/IDS and EPP/EDR tools rank highly. What is noticeable is that deception ranked as one of the top two or three detection tools for combating lateral movement, Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), ransomware and insider threats.
Respondents in “The Cybersecurity Landscape” report included 100 security professionals with the title of CISO, CIO, Cybersecurity Director, Security Risk Officer/Manager, Director of Security, or VP of Security. The study focuses on their highest priority concerns and priorities, how they evaluate their activities, and what tools and resources they plan to use to improve their security posture.
