High-profile cyberattacks prompt boost in crisis simulation budgets

Following a number of high-profile cybersecurity incidents in 2014 CISOs are reassessing their organization's readiness to manage a potential chaos of a full-scale cyber crisis.

New data from Hack The Box shows many CISOs -- based on a sample of 200 across the UK and US -- are concerned about their organization's ability to handle a cyber crisis. This is down to a number of reasons, the rising volume of cyber incidents (31 percent), lack of incident response planning (20 percent), and a lack of realistic, stress-tested crisis simulations (19 percent).

The effect of this is that 74 percent of CISOs report their organizations are increasing annual budgets for crisis simulation exercises in 2025, motivated by last year's major incidents. 73 percent identify practical crisis simulations and incident response exercises, involving both technical and non-technical teams, as their top business priority for 2025. In addition 77 percent say they would allocate greater budgets for cyber crisis simulations if the exercises were more realistic and actionable.

Haris Pylarinos, CEO and founder at Hack The Box, says:

Preparedness is the foundation of resilience, and crisis simulations play a crucial role in testing organization's security and workforce performance when it's most critical. Organizations are right to prioritize crisis simulation and must ensure that these are implemented in the right way. There is a need for these exercises to be increasingly realistic and engaging, to equip both technical and non-technical teams of all levels with the confidence needed to decisively defend against evolving threats.

The next evolution of crisis simulation is coupling AI with expert knowledge to deliver highly realistic and tailored scenarios that challenge senior management and front-line professionals. These will unite previously disparate business units as one and allow real-world performance to be benchmarked in a controlled environment.

You can read more on the Hack The Box site.

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