Just in time for the beginning of a new school year, DomainTools released its second annual Cybersecurity Report Card in which security professionals were surveyed about their security posture and asked to grade the overall health of their programs.The annual survey of more than 500 security professionals revealed that the health of cybersecurity programs has improved over the past year. The report also sheds light on how cybersecurity practices are evolving, and what successful organizations are doing to adapt to the ever-changing threat landscape.
In spite of today’s volatile security climate, the research shows infosec professionals feel more confident now than in previous years due to a greater investment in automated processes, threat intelligence solutions, and a commitment to company-wide training. When compared to 2017, the percentage of respondents that said their organization should be graded as a C or lower declined. Looking at the grades overall, it’s clear that organizations surveyed have refined and improved their security posture.
“In the midst of a seemingly never-ending flow of attacks, this annual report provides insight into the approaches that will take security grades from an F to an A.” said Corin Imai, DomainTools’ Sr. Product Marketing Manager. “It’s notable that A and B grades come from a strategic use of automation and that we are seeing a decrease in the number of teams using manual processes.”
Additional findings revealed the success behind this year’s top cybersecurity programs and grade A security pros include:
- Automation: 92 percent of grade A companies said they use automation to simplify time consuming processes. Conversely, D and F companies said their processes are highly manual.
- Training: 5 percent more organizations plan to step up security awareness training in the coming year than did last year, and the number that intend to skip training initiatives decreased by half from 2017.
- Threat intelligence: 82 percent of security professionals find value in using DNS-based threat intelligence.
- Expand to a larger threat infrastructure map: 71 percent of grade A organizations have the ability to expand from one indicator to a larger map of threat infrastructure, but 35 percent of organizations still lack in this area.
- Forensic analysis: A and B organizations were more likely to follow-up on clues and evidence and conduct forensic analysis of compromised machines compared to D and F teams.
The report also looked at the most common threat vectors that organizations detect and found that one-third of organizations detect malicious activity – predominantly from malware, spear-phishing, ransomware and business email compromise – several times every day. Among organizations that did report a breach in 2018, fewer indicated they “did not know” whether they were targeted or not than in 2017.
