Organizations are getting much better at stopping cyber-attacks, but still suffered on average 30 security breaches last year, causing damage or data loss, according to Accenture.
The global consultancy polled 4600 cybersecurity practitioners in companies with revenues over $1bn across 15 countries, to compile its 2018 State of Cyber Resilience Executive Summary.
It found that 87% are now preventing “focused” attacks, up from 70% last year, but that still leaves 13% of online raids penetrating defenses.
The report also claimed that over half (55%) of global enterprises took one week or less to detect a breach, compared to just 10% last year, while 89% detected within a month.
FireEye estimated a global median dwell time of 101 days in its most recent M-Trends report.
Accenture respondents placed cyber-threat analytics (46%) and security monitoring (46%) as the number one most-needed technologies to fill existing gaps. An additional 83% agreed that AI, machine/deep learning, user behavior analytics and blockchain are “essential to securing the future of organizations.”
“While the findings of this study demonstrate that organisations are performing better at mitigating the impact of cyber-attacks, they still have more work to do. Building investment capacity for wise security investments must be a priority for those organizations who want to close the gap on successful attacks even further,” said Kelly Bissell, managing director of Accenture Security.
“For business leaders who continue to invest in and embrace new technologies, reaching a sustainable level of cyber-resilience could become a reality for many organizations in the next two to three years. That’s an encouraging projection.”
Global organizations breached a record 2.6 billion documents last year, up 88% on 2016, according to Gemalto.
Like Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report, the firm’s study last week highlighted the importance of mitigating insider risk.
Accidental loss, including improper disposal of records, misconfigured databases and other issues, caused the exposure of 1.9 billion records – a 580% increase from 2016.