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17 December 2014

Sophisticated cyber attacks overwhelm firms

2014-12-15


More than 80% of security leaders believe the challenge posed by external threats is on the rise, while 60% also agree their organizations areoutgunned in the cyber war, according to IBM. 

The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) study, conducted by the IBM Center for Applied Insights and is based on responses from 138 in-depth interviews.

Two in five respondents identified sophisticated external threats as their top challenge with regulations coming in a distant second at just under 15%.

As enterprise leaders continue to outline business priorities, external threats will require the most organizational effort over the next three to five years – as much as regulations, new technologies, and internal threats combined.

“CISOs are finally getting a seat in the boardroom,” said Brendan Hannigan, general manager of IBM Security. “Security leaders must now use this growing influence to deliver better results — prioritizing the protection of critical assets, focusing investments on intelligence and recruiting top industry talent to augment internal efforts.”

The study found that 70% of security leaders believe they have mature, traditional technologies that focus on network intrusion prevention, advanced malware detection and network vulnerability scanning.

However, nearly half agree that deploying new security technology is the top focus area for their organization. They identified data leakage prevention, cloud security and mobile/device security as the top three areas in need of dramatic transformation.

In addition to external threats, the study indicated that CISOs face additional challenges from governments as nearly 80% of respondents said the potential risk from regulations and standards have increased over the past three years.

They are most uncertain about whether governments will handle security governance on a national or global level as well as how transparent they will be in doing so. Only 22% think that a global approach to combating cybercrime will be agreed upon in the next three to five years.

According to the study, 90% of security leaders strongly agree that they have significant influence in their organization, with 76% stating that their degree of influence has significantly increased in the last three years. In addition, 71% strongly agree that they are receiving the organizational support that they need in order to do their jobs effectively.

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