Hackers are outpacing and adapting their techniques at a faster pace than defenders, and nearly half of all cyberattacks are resulting in financial damages over $500,000, including lost revenue, customers, opportunities and out-of-pocket costs. According to the Cisco 2018 Annual Cybersecurity Report, cybersecurity professionals say they will increasingly leverage and spend more on tools that use AI and machine learning to address the increasing threats.

In the survey, 92 percent of security professionals said behavior analytics tools work well, and two-thirds of respondents in the healthcare sector found these analytics extremely effective to identify malicious actors.

The use of cloud is also growing – 27 percent of security professionals said they are using off-premises private clouds, compared with 20 percent in 2016. Among those security professionals, 57 percent say they host networks in the cloud because of better data security. However, the report says that attackers are taking advantage of the fact that security teams are having difficulty defending evolving and expanding cloud environments.