Spending on security technology continues to soar. Nevertheless, data breaches and cyberattacks continue to make headlines at an incredible rate, with no relief in sight. The Online Trust Alliance reported that attacks in 2017 came from a myriad of vectors, such as phishing and ransomware, and that the number of attacks doubled to nearly 160,000 incidents per year over 2016. What’s worse, estimates for the number of unreported attacks exceed 350,000 annually.
While enterprises typically dominate the headlines, organizations of all sizes are affected by cyber incidents. A recent Ponemon study showed that two-thirds of small and mid-sized businesses reported that threats evaded their intrusion detection systems, and more than half of the companies said they were attacked by ransomware more than twice during the last year. There is no dispute that the number of vulnerable endpoints and the complexity of threats will continue to increase, and limited IT budgets and overstretched staff will remain an industry-wide problem. It’s clear that companies need to adopt new approaches to stay ahead of cyberattacks.
Firewalls and antivirus solutions are the norm in most IT shops, and they do thwart security attacks daily. Despite being very widely deployed, industry trends clearly show the need for more innovative approaches to threat detection.
