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Despite heavy toll of cyberattacks, 8 in 10 enterprises lack a strategy to manage them

July 27, 2016

More than three-quarters (79 percent) of the IT professionals in a recent Ponemon Institute poll said their infrastructure for identifying and mitigating external internet threats is nonexistent, ad hoc or inconsistently applied throughout the enterprise.

More than 500 companies surveyed averaged more than one cyberattack per month and incurred annual costs of approximately $3.5 million from these attacks.

The report "Security Beyond the Traditional Perimeter," sponsored by internet risk detection and mitigation expert BrandProtect, examined threats, costs and responses to cyberattacks, including executive impersonations; social engineering exploits; and branded attacks arising outside a company's traditional security perimeter.

Key findings of the survey include:

• 59 percent of respondents said that protection of intellectual property from external threats is essential or very important to the sustainability of the company;
• 79 percent of respondents described their security processes for internet and social media monitoring as nonexistent (38 percent); ad hoc (23 percent); or inconsistently applied throughout the enterprise (18 percent).
• 64 percent of security leaders believe they lack the tools and resources they need to monitor external threats; 62 percent lack the tools and resources they need to analyze and understand them; and 68 percent lack the tools and resources they need to mitigate them.
• respondents cited monitoring priorities that include mobile app monitoring (62 percent), social engineering and organizational reconnaissance (61 percent); branded exploits (59 percent); spear-phishing infrastructure (58 percent); and executive and high value threats (54 percent).

"As external threats explode in both frequency and sophistication, forward-leaning security teams are actively prioritizing external threat detection, intelligence and mitigation in their objectives," said Roberto Drassinower, CEO of BrandProtect. "But ... the majority of enterprises still have a long way to go. Despite losing millions of dollars annually to external and branded exploits, security teams are dealing with a significant readiness gap."

Read the executive summary

(The Ponemon Institute survey included 591 respondents from 505 companies representing a wide range of industries.)