Organisations In Asia Pacific and Japan find security operations challenging: Sophos

• 3,000 security and IT leaders participated in study
• Most struggle to identify the root causes behind an Incident

Sophos, a cybersecurity as a service company, recently published a survey report, which found 93% of organisations across Asia Pacific and Japan find the execution of some essential security operation tasks, such as threat hunting, challenging. 

These tasks include understanding how an attack happened, with 76% of respondents stating they have challenges identifying the root cause of an incident and 71% of those surveyed reported challenges with timely remediation.
 
According to “The State of Cybersecurity 2023: The Business Impact of Adversaries on Defenders” report, 74% correspondents said they have challenges understanding which signals and alerts to investigate, and 71% reported challenges prioritising 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,” said John Shier (pic), field CTO of commercial at Sophos. 
 
Additional findings include:

• 50% of organisations surveyed said that cyberthreats are now too advanced for their organisation to deal with on their own.
• 63% wish the IT team could spend more time on strategic issues and less time on firefighting, and 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 organisations 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,” added Shier.
 
Data from The State of Cybersecurity 2023: The Business Impact of Adversaries on Defenders comes from an independent study of 3,000 leaders responsible for IT/cybersecurity across 14 countries conducted in January and February 2023.

The report can be found here.