Report: 93% of Organisations Struggles to Execute Essential Security Operation Tasks

Emma Okonji

Sophos, a global leader in innovating and delivering cybersecurity as a service, has released a new survey report, titled: “The State of Cybersecurity 2023: The Business Impact of Adversaries on Defenders,” which found that, globally, 93 per cent of organisations finds the execution of some essential security operation tasks, such as threat hunting, challenging. 

The challenges, according to the report, also include understanding how an attack happened, with 75 per cent of respondents stating they have challenges identifying the root cause of an incident. 

This, the report said, could make proper remediation difficult, leaving organisations’ vulnerable to repetitive and/or multiple attacks, by the same or different adversaries, especially since 71 per cent of those surveyed also reported challenges with timely remediation.

In addition, 71 per cent said they have challenges understanding which signals/alerts to investigate, and the same percent reported challenges prioritizing investigations.

Analysing the report, the Field CTO, Commercial at Sophos, John Shier, said: “Only one fifth of respondents considered vulnerabilities and remote services a top cybersecurity risk for 2023, yet the ground truth is that these are routinely exploited by Active Adversaries. This cascade of operational issues means that these organisations aren’t seeing the full picture and are potentially acting on incorrect information. There’s nothing worse than being confidently wrong. Having external audits and monitoring helps eliminate blind spots.”