90 Percent of Security Professionals have Top Concerns of Compromised Credentials

Length of investigations, limited resources, and lack of context put security professionals at a disadvantage when responding to security incidents

Rapid7, Inc. (NASDAQ: RPD), a leading provider of security data and analytics solutions, today released the results of its 2015 Incident Detection and Response Survey. The survey includes findings from hundreds of security professionals at organizations of varied sizes across the globe on their biggest security concerns and planned initiatives for 2016. Punctuating the results were two key points: (1) 90% of organizations are worried about compromised credentials, though 60% say they cannot catch these types of attacks today; and (2) 62% of organizations are receiving more alerts than they can feasibly investigate.

These key findings are strongly underscored by the fact that compromised credentials have been the leading attack vector for the last five years according to the Verizon 2015 Data Breach and Investigations Report. Additionally, intruders generally remain undetected for an average of 197 days within retail organizations and 98 days within financial services organizations once they’ve breached a network.

“Security professionals are struggling to detect and investigate incidents because the monitoring solutions available do not provide visibility into today’s modern IT environments and cannot give users the insight they need to make decisions quickly,” said Lee Weiner, senior vice president of products and engineering at Rapid7. “This lack of understanding – or context – is causing massive alert fatigue and leaving companies unable to effectively detect the most used attack method today: compromised credentials.”

Information security teams are expected to mitigate risk in sprawling environments, where employees are remotely accessing the network, at any time, from any place. The network perimeter has now expanded to include cloud services, mobile devices, and global workforces that encompass partners and contractors, making prevention as the sole security strategy effectively obsolete. Preventative solutions alone cannot protect against many of the most common attack vectors behind breaches, such as phishing and stolen credentials.

In an effort to better monitor their IT environments, security teams are investing further in incident detection and response solutions to detect and contain compromise when it occurs. However, while 55% of organizations say they are using a SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) to aid with incident detection and response, alarmingly, 62% of these organizations report receiving more alerts than they can handle. In addition, SIEMs are not being used to monitor cloud services in use, leaving organizations blind to this important part of modern IT environments.

Additional highlights from the survey include:

• 45% of respondents plan to increase spending on incident response programs and solutions
• Only 1/3 of organizations report visibility into cloud services, while 79% of respondents reported allowing the use of at least one cloud service within their organization
• The top three challenges facing security teams today are: (1) no visibility into user risk; (2) more alerts than the security team can handle; and (3) investigations that take too long

[su_box title=”About Rapid7″ style=”noise” box_color=”#336588″]Rapid7 security data and analytics software and services help organizations reduce the risk of a breach, detect and investigate attacks, and build effective IT security programs. With comprehensive real-time data collection, advanced correlation, and insight into attacker techniques, Rapid7 strengthens an organization’s ability to defend against everything from opportunistic drive-by attacks to advanced threats. Unlike traditional vulnerability management and incident detection technologies, Rapid7 provides visibility, monitoring, and insight across assets and users from the endpoint to the cloud. Dedicated to solving the toughest security challenges, Rapid7 offers proprietary capabilities to spot intruders leveraging today’s #1 attack vector: compromised credentials. Rapid7 is trusted by more than 3,700 organizations across 90 countries, including 30% of the Fortune 1000.[/su_box]