Organizations are responding faster to cyber threats
On average, organizations' response time to cyber attacks improved by around a third -- from 29 to 19 days -- from 2021 to 2022.
The report from Immersive Labs suggests this improvement can be attributed to the urgency and need for fast response times amid the fallout of the Log4j crisis and other high-profile vulnerabilities over the past year.
The study is based on organizations' performance completing real-life cyber simulations spanning 1.1 million exercises and labs spanning technical staff to executives during a 12-month period from April 2022 to April 2023. But whilst response times have improved it does reveal other problems.
While organizations are ensuring that cyber resilience activities span the MITRE ATT&CK framework, Immersive observed a notable bias towards the earliest stages of the attack lifecycle, suggesting security leaders are potentially leaving their organizations exposed to after-incident risk.
The report also shows that seasoned cyber professionals are more complacent in their skills than junior staff. Junior staff tend to challenge themselves with more difficult exercises and are more likely to stay current with new threats compared to more experienced colleagues. A greater number of junior workers on average complete content that is more difficult than more experienced professionals.
"Leaders should ensure that their workforce -- at all levels of experience -- stays current with emerging threats, and get proof of their teams' knowledge, skills and judgment to quickly and effectively respond to threats," says Immersive Labs CEO and founder James Hadley. "Our report's insights underscore the critical importance of consistently conducting realistic exercises to assess skills gaps and fill them before it's too late -- but just as importantly, if the worse case scenario does happen, knowing how to best handle incidents 'after the boom' to mitigate fallout."
Regulated industries tend to outperform their less-regulated peers, but only just, with a six percent difference across key resilience metrics, showing that regulated industries are on average not substantially better prepared for attacks than less-regulated ones. Financial services enterprises tend to perform the best, as the industry represents seven of the top 10 overall performers, something which can be largely attributed to their commitment to continuous exercising and benchmarking of their teams.
You can get the full report on the Immersive Labs site.
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