70 percent of organizations are swamped by threat data

New research from threat intelligence platform Anomali and the Ponemon Institute shows that 70 percent of security industry professionals believe threat intelligence is often too big and/or complex to provide actionable insights.

It also shows that they often fail to share essential threat data with board members and C-level executives, despite the fact that security is now a business priority.

In addition the study finds that security teams within organizations aren't optimized to deliver on threat intelligence. Less than half (46 percent) of those polled say incident responders use threat data when deciding how to respond to malicious activity, which leaves numerous vulnerabilities undiscovered. Almost three quarters (73 percent) admit they aren’t using threat data very effectively to pinpoint cyber threats.

Reasons for this failure include a lack of staff expertise (69 percent), lack of ownership (58 percent) and a lack of suitable technologies (52 percent). The report also reveals that 52 percent of respondents believe their companies need a qualified threat analyst to maximize the value of threat intelligence. 43 percent say the data isn't used to drive decision making within their organization's security operations center, and 49 percent say their IT security team doesn’t receive or read threat intelligence reports.

"Too much data that is not delivered in the right way can be just as bad as not enough. This is the situation that many companies find themselves in. We call it threat overload," says Hugh Njemanze, CEO of Anomali. "The number of threat indicators is skyrocketing and organizations simply cannot cope with the volume of threat intelligence data coming their way. It’s clear that what businesses need is a system that pinpoints the threats they must take notice of and that gives them actionable and relevant insights".

Despite the failings, 78 percent of respondents rate the importance of threat intelligence in achieving a strong cyber security posture as very high. Two-thirds of organizations either have or are planning to deploy a threat intelligence platform and 70 percent are seeking to improve threat intelligence efficiency in the future.

You can read more about the findings in a white paper which is available to download from the Anomali website.

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