Network situational awareness firm Lumeta Corporation has announced the release of a survey findings which polled 5,000 US IT executives, who count among their responsibilities large enterprise network security and network management.
The survey revealed that there is a significant gap between the needs of IT professionals and actual cybersecurity threat detection methods.
The survey, “Current Trends in Enterprise IT Network Security,”was conducted by independent research firm LTM research on behalf of Lumeta. The findings indicate that a majority of respondents–90 percent of IT professionals–said they want to detect incidents, which could lead to breaches of their network security, within one day.
Additionally, 7 percent hoped for detection in less than one week, and 3 percent in less than one month. In reality, the average amount of time of a breach is greater than 6 months.
“As industry data refutes some of the key statements made by respondents, I fear they may be falsely confident that their security program is adequately protecting their information assets,” said Reggie Best, chief marketing officer of Lumeta.
Survey results reveal that over 60 percent of respondents believe they are alerted to rogue network behavior within a 10 minute timeframe, yet realistically, only 31 percent of companies are able to locate such breaches internally on their own, according to the 2015 Mandiant Threat Report. Others had to be notified by third party sources, such as law enforcement or contractors.
Nearly half of the survey respondents said there are key challenges impeding proper visibility of the network. 49 percent of respondents said they were unable to properly monitor the network on every possible device, including via mobile applications or through cloud usage. Furthermore, 48 percent said lack of comprehensive security-based intelligence hinders network visibility.
“With these key impediments to network visibility, they don’t know what they are missing on their networks. It’s of little wonder that two-thirds of survey respondents are concerned that their companies are experiencing an undetected attack right now,” said Best.
Research findings further showed that 63 percent of IT executives showed concern over threats emanating from mobile, virtual, and cloud assets, which are intermittently present in a network. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents of were concerned about being able to detect cybersecurity based threats quickly enough, from transitory assets.
As malicious actors continue toenhance their attack methods, and utilize mobile means of communication, including cloud and the Internet of Things (IoT,) for intrusion, network visibility will be important, making it imperative that organizations have the proper security triggers and network notifications in place.
“To combat malicious activity on their networks, organizations must incorporate capabilities to comprehensively understand all that is connected to their network, and have a real-time view of new assets as they join the network,” said Best.
