The Most Dangerous Threat Is The One You Can't See

Enterprise leaders ask yourselves: what is the most immediate financial threat to your company?

It isn’t the Fed hiking interest rates, and it isn’t Baby Boomers exiting the workforce. We’ve seen brilliant innovation in the cybersecurity space, but most companies’ solution is to stitch a bunch of uncoordinated pieces together and cross their fingers, leaving an immediate opening for massive financial damage.

Q2 2023 is on track to have the most cybersecurity attacks of any quarter in history. The average cost of a data breach is $4.35 million globally. In the United States, that number increases to a whopping $9.44 million. For the healthcare industry, a breach costs $10.10 million.

What gets even crazier is that breaches like these take weeks, often closer to a year to identify – that’s just identification. It takes even longer to address and fully secure these breaches.

The most common cause of a data breach is stolen or compromised credentials. These types of breaches take the longest time to identify at 327 days. In 2022, the average data breach took about 9 months to identify and contain. The sooner a breach is identified and contained, the more the cost is reduced. Companies that contained a data breach in 200 days or less saved an average of $1.12 million.

Despite all of the risks, very little is being done by corporations and users to further protect themselves.

A vast majority of IT security analysts worry they’ve been missing important security events internally. But according to a survey by Vectra AI, 71% of IT security analysts may have been compromised and aren't aware of it. 

That means most professionals go through their day with the implicit belief that their system may already be breached, but they’re just waiting on the notification, which as stated earlier could take close to a year in some cases.

Furthermore, the Identify Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reports that a 67% increase in no actionable information being given to users about the root cause of an observed compromise. More and more users learn about breaches occurring but are given little information regarding the origin and how to protect themselves in the future from similar events.

A security team stumbling through the dark, and an increasing number of users unsure of how to improve their security posture after a breach – this is how most companies do security operations today.

Most cybersecurity experts lack visibility into their systems, and often don’t even know if they’ve been breached or not. And once they have been breached, it often takes so long for the breach to be detected that it costs companies millions.

Much of this has to do with another issue known as “tool sprawl” – when companies have numerous point solution tools to solve numerous different cybersecurity problems. Tool sprawl makes it so that system visibility is disrupted and unsynchronized, drastically increasing the time it takes for a breach to be detected and remedied.

The fact that IT analysts can’t know for certain whether a breach has occurred or not, and that such breaches, if left undetected, cost companies millions of dollars on average, tells us that it’s time for a serious change for how a company’s security risk posture is examined from the birds-eye view.