Are you prepared for dealing with a breach?

RSA, The Security Division of EMC, released the results of a new global breach readiness survey that covered thirty countries and compared those global results with a survey of the Security for Business Innovation Council (SBIC), a group of top security leaders from the Global 1000.

Using the SBIC as a benchmark, the results suggest that the majority of organizations are not following incident response best practices and are not well prepared to face the challenges of today’s advanced cyber threats.

Organizations continue to struggle with the adoption of technologies and best practices that will allow them to more effectively detect, respond to, and disrupt the cyberattacks that turn into damaging breaches.

Incident response is a core capability that needs to be developed and consistently honed to effectively face the increasing volume of cyberattack activity. While all leading edge SBIC members have developed an incident response function, 30% of at-large organizations surveyed do not have formal incident response plans in place. Furthermore, of those who do have a plan, 57% admit to never updating or reviewing them.

Content Intelligence in the survey measured awareness gained from tools, technology and processes in place to identify and monitor critical assets. While all SBIC members have a capability to gather data and provide centralized alerting, 55% of the general survey population lacks this capability rendering them blind to many threats. Identifying false positives still proves a difficult task.

Only 50% of the general respondents have a formal plan in place for identifying false positives while over 90% of SBIC members have automated cyber-security technologies and a process to update information to reduce the chances of future incidents.

Most organizations recognize that basic log collection through SIEM systems only provides partial visibility into their environment. In the general survey, 72% of survey participants have access to malware or endpoint forensics, however, only 42% of survey participants have capabilities for more sophisticated network forensics, including packet capture and net flow analysis.

External threat intelligence and information sharing is also a key activity for organizations to stay up-to-date on attackers’ current tactics and motives. Only 43% of the survey participants at large are leveraging an external threat intelligence source to supplement their efforts. Finally, attackers continue to exploit known but unaddressed vulnerabilities in damaging breaches.

Despite this common knowledge, only 40% of the general population had an active vulnerability management program in place, making it more challenging to keep their security programs ahead of attackers.

Dave Martin, Chief Trust Offer, RSA, The Security Division of EMC, said: “Organizations are struggling to gain visibility into operational risk across the business. As business has become increasingly digital, information security has become a key area of operational risk and while many organizations may feel they have a good handle on their security, it is still rarely tied in to a larger operational risk strategy, which limits their visibility into their actual risk profile.”