Report looks at the state of cyber incident response

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Published: Thursday, 03 August 2017 09:04

Demisto, Inc., has published the results of the State of Incident Response 2017, a study investigating challenges faced by incident response teams. Security professionals from across the globe participated in the research – the first industry study to cover all aspects of incident response, including SOC location, training issues, tools utilization, and what metrics are being tracked.

The study revealed new data around companies’ struggles to keep up with and respond to cyberattacks due to lack of resources. For example, more than 40 percent of respondents said their organizations are not prepared to measure incident response, and only 14.5 percent of respondents are measuring MTTR (mean time to respond). The study also discovered that 30 percent of respondents reported they have no playbooks, runbooks or other documentation for incident response actions.

The study also validated the known security staff shortage issues with new findings. More than 90 percent of the respondents indicated they are challenged finding experienced employees with the necessary skill sets. The study found it takes an average of 9 months from the initiation of a hiring requisition until the new hire is fully trained. Since the need is frequently identified long before the hiring process begins, companies are without a resource – from the point where a need is identified until the point they have fully trained analysts – for almost a year. On the retention side, more than one-third of IR staff leaves within 3 years.

Other key findings of the research include:

• When asked about the areas where automation can help, 54 percent of respondents asserted that security operations and incident response are the two top priorities for them at this time.
• While 54 percent of respondents believed that automating incident response would provide immediate benefits, only 9 percent had already automated this facet.
• When asked how many people in the respondents’ organizations were dedicated solely to incident response, 6 percent responded that there were none and 22.3 percent stated that there were only one or two.
• According to respondents, the biggest incident response challenges are working with a large number of information security tools (37.7 percent), followed by responding to a large number of incidents (36.1 percent), and not having enough time (34.4 percent).
• According to respondents, 4 percent feel there are significantly more alerts than can be handled by their staff, while 47.4 percent report it is hard to know which alerts to prioritize.

Demisto sponsored this independent, third-party study conducted with security professionals from around the world working for companies ranging from less than 500 employees to greater than 20,000 employees. More than 200 responses were analyzed for this study, which is planned to be updated annually. Virtual Intelligence Briefing (ViB) conducted the overall research.