88 percent of organizations have suffered cyber breaches in the last two years

A new survey of 300 CIOs, CISOs, and security executives from enterprises across Europe and the USA shows that 88 percent of organizations admit to being compromised by a cyber incident over the past two years.

The study from Pentera reveals that this is despite organizations having an average of almost 44 security solutions in place.

Organizations are increasingly turning to pentesting, while the need for it originated with regulatory requirements, the main motivations for pentesting today are security validation, potential damage assessment, and cyber insurance. With only 22 percent of respondents citing compliance as their primary motivation for the practice, regulatory or executive mandates are still important, but not the primary rationale driving pentesting.

"We're seeing more organizations increase the cadence of pentesting, but what we really need to achieve is continuous validation across the entire organization," says Aviv Cohen, CMO of Pentera. "Annual pentesting assessments leave security teams in the dark most of the year regarding their security posture. Security teams need up-to-date information about their exposure using automated solutions for their security validation."

Despite the recent global economic slowdown, cybersecurity budgets are not expected to be impacted in 2023. 92 percent of organizations report a rise in their IT security budgets, and 85 percent report a rise in their pentesting budget.

The results of the report will be presented by Cohen at Pentera's XPOSURE Summit on March 1, 2023 at 9am ET.

Image credit: Den Rise / Shutterstock