Dangerous Gaps in Awareness of Cyber Threats for Enterprises

DomainTools, the leader in domain name and DNS research, announced its 2015 Value of Threat Intelligence Report, conducted by Osterman Research, Inc. The research found that when it comes to understanding how a hacker penetrated the corporate network, nearly a quarter (23 percent) had no insight on which channel a breach occurred. Despite the 66 percent year-over-year increase in cyberattacks since 2009, nearly 50 percent of respondents do not currently have a Threat Intelligence solution. In fact, a number of the organizations surveyed declared they were unlikely to act until after a major breach has occurred. The full research report can be found here.

For many, cost is the main blocking issue with 60 percent of organizations concerned about the expense of implementing a Threat Intelligence platform to mitigate a “potential” breach before it happens. As a result, when these organizations are attacked, the majority of respondents don’t learn about the attempt or incursion for weeks or months after it occurred – leaving their entire network vulnerable the whole time.

“There’s a perception that Threat Intelligence solutions are too expensive for the average organization to leverage, leaving many companies poorly armed to fight the growing cyber threat spectra,” said Tim Chen, CEO of DomainTools. “But as the report confirms, 82 percent of organizations would utilize threat intel most or all of the time if it were provisioned internally. DomainTools, with products like our new Iris threat intelligence platform, is working hard to change the economics of cyber protection by bringing to market solutions that are more cost-effective and easier to implement and use.”

Key findings in the report include:

• A strong majority of identified attacks continue to come from either email or website navigation, making DNS (in the form of email or web domains and IP addresses) a key component for attack execution.
• Only 1 percent of organizations would not use a Threat Intelligence solution if it were made available to them.
• If given a modest budget increase, only 21 percent said they would invest in staffing, while 70 percent would choose either infrastructure, SIEM or threat intelligence.

The survey was comprised of over 120 qualified security/business executives at companies with an average of 20,000 employees, where the majority had experienced a data breach over the past 12 months.[su_box title=”About DomainTools” style=”noise” box_color=”#336588″]DomainTools is the leader in domain name and DNS-based cyber threat intelligence. With over 14 years of ‘cyber fingerprint’ data across the global Internet, DomainTools helps companies assess security threats, profile attackers, investigate online fraud and crimes, and map cyber activity in order to stop attacks. Fortune 1000 companies, global government agencies, and many security solution vendors use the DomainTools platform as a critical ingredient in their threat investigation and mitigation work.[/su_box]