93% of APJ enterprises find SecOps challenging

Sophos, a leading global cybersecurity service provider, has recently released a survey report titled “The State of Cybersecurity 2023: The Business Impact of Adversaries on Defenders.” The report reveals that 93% of organizations in Asia Pacific and Japan find some essential security operation tasks, such as threat hunting, challenging.

Additionally, 76% of respondents have difficulty identifying the root cause of an incident, making proper remediation difficult. This leaves organizations vulnerable to repetitive and/or multiple attacks by the same or different adversaries, especially since 71% of those surveyed reported challenges with timely remediation.

The report highlights the need for organizations to improve their cybersecurity posture and invest in advanced threat detection and response capabilities to stay ahead of the evolving threat landscape. In addition, 74% said they have challenges understanding which signals/alerts to investigate, and 71% reported challenges prioritizing investigations.

“Only one fifth of respondents globally 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 organizations 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. We can look at you the way an attacker does,” said John Shier, field CTO, commercial, Sophos.

The report also says revealed that 50% of organizations surveyed said that cyberthreats are now too advanced for their organization to deal with on their own, 63% wish the IT team could spend more time on strategic issues and less time on firefighting, 55% said that the time spent on cyberthreats has impacted the IT team’s work on other projects, while 94% said they are working with external specialists to scale their operations, the majority still remain involved with managing threats rather than taking a fully outsourced approach.

“Today’s threats require a timely and coordinated response. Unfortunately, too many organizations are stuck in reactive mode. Not only is this having an impact on core business priorities, but it also has a sizeable human toll, with over half of global respondents stating that cyberattacks are keeping them up at night. Eliminating the guesswork and applying defensive controls based on actionable intelligence will let IT teams focus on enabling the business instead of trying to douse the eternal flame of active attacks,” he added.