It’s not that fixing Critical and High-Severity vulnerabilities is the problem; it’s that the Medium and Low severity vulnerabilities can pose significant risks as well. For any given vulnerability, we need to distinguish between its severity and the risk that results from it being present on a particular system on our network.
Essentially, one-third of analysts’ time is being spent on processing alerts that have unknowingly already been processed, and at present SOC teams are left with little ability to make this distinction resulting in massive manpower drain.
In 2015, it seemed no one was safe from hackers. The year began with Sony reeling from a hack that put the studio and celebrities such as Seth Rogen and James Franco in a web of geopolitics and extortion. Seven months later came the high-profile Ashley Madison hack, which resulted in the release of the email and physical addresses for 37 million users. Cybercriminals stole $1 billion from banks in 30 countries as part of the Carbanak hack. Even the Director of the CIA wasn’t safe – his AOL email account was hacked by someone claiming to be a high school student.
Being adequately prepared to respond to a data breach is an ever-changing game – new threats are emerging, new regulations are being put into place and companies must regularly re-evaluate their response plans to ensure they are applicable to today’s threat landscape. Unfortunately, many companies are not reviewing and updating their plans frequently enough – in fact, only 25 percent of companies say they update their response plans once or twice a year. Not to mention that no matter how well prepared and updated a company’s plan is, an actual live breach response can present unforeseen challenges that cause companies to stumble.
While an organization’s CISO focuses on cybersecurity, they depend on the C-suite to combine business operations and necessary security measures to find success.
Findings from an annual Ponemon study on data breaches showed that while more companies have plans in place, they still lack confidence and are failing to take crucial steps as part of the preparedness process, preventing them from being truly ready for a real life data breach incident.
It takes months for most computer intrusion victims to learn they were breached. Unfortunately, the hackers get busy much sooner, often stealing data within days if not minutes.