Attivo Networks, a company focused on deception for cybersecurity threat detection, announced the results of the company’s 2018 Top Threat Detection Concerns and Trends Survey. This survey reveals new insights about top information security concerns related to detecting and stopping attackers, identifying which technologies are impacting attackers, shifts in time to detection, and technologies being used to impact this change. The company surveyed more than 450 cybersecurity professionals and executives globally to gain insights into detection trends, top threat concerns, attack surface concerns, and what’s on their 2019 security wish list.
Overall, the survey highlighted that the battle to keep cyber attackers from successfully compromising networks is not working. Over 50% of respondents reported that 100 days of dwell time or more was representative of their organization, while nearly half of respondents indicated that their mean time to detection was plateauing or increasing. Surprisingly, malware and ransomware (61%) topped the charts of concern, despite available anti-virus, firewall, and other prevention technologies. Gaps in efficacy of prevention solutions were also highlighted with credential theft (52%) and targeted attacks (50%), which are renowned for bypassing these controls, stated as top respondent concerns.
The survey also reinforced that the battle is now shifting inside the network. In fact, 23% of respondents reported that they are now spending more on detection than prevention security controls. One of the most interesting and somewhat surprising findings was that surveyed defenders felt that attackers are most concerned about threat deception technology (55%) and NextGen Firewalls (NGF)/ intrusion detection system IDS (56%). This would indicate that NGF/IDS is viewed as an effective way to detect and stop known threats, whereas deception is the technology that respondents felt that attackers believe will detect unknown threats, their attacks regardless of attack vector, and when they use techniques that are not reliably detected by preventative tools. Interestingly, the respondents were least concerned about UEBA (15%) out of all categories.
