Businesses wait for damaging cyber attacks before taking action: Study

DULLES, Va., June 6, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- A new global study commissioned by Raytheon (NYSE: RTN) reveals organizations worldwide wait until they fall victim to a damaging cyber attack before engaging a provider of managed security services, or MSS. Two-thirds of survey respondents indicated that not until there is a significant data loss from an IT security breach are their organizations motivated to engage a vendor.

Don't Wait: The Evolution of Proactive Threat Hunting, a survey of 1,784 information security leaders in 19 countries about outsourcing network security activities, also revealed organizations are looking for more from their providers than traditional services such as firewalls, intrusion detection and virtual private networks. To truly defend their networks from attacks amidst staff shortfalls, budget pressures and higher-risk cyber environments, security leaders are adopting MSS that include advanced capabilities like hunting, incident response and integration services, currently offered by a small subset of today's providers.

"Cybersecurity is not a waiting game, and organizations without the expertise and tools required to identify and respond to skilled adversaries need to understand that," said Jack Harrington, vice president of cybersecurity and special missions at Raytheon Intelligence, Information and Services. "The old approach waited for technology to flag known threats. In contrast, skilled hunters like those on our team proactively seek emerging threats and stop them before businesses suffer damage."

Eighty percent of respondents reported that MSS are important to their overall IT security strategy. However, there is room for improvement. Eighty-four percent say their provider does not offer proactive hunting services even though they effectively find the most insidious threats impacting enterprises and governments alike.

"There is only one way to find the most sophisticated, damaging cyber threats attacking a company's network: proactively hunt for them," said David Amsler, president of Raytheon Foreground Security. "Too many organizations today rely on reactive models and automated tools that attempt to detect threats through signature-, rule- or sandbox-driven models. The reactive approach is not enough to stop the determined and sophisticated adversaries which are most often the cause of significant damage or data loss."

Raytheon's related offerings include proactive threat hunting, a virtual security operations center, its patented Automated Threat Intelligence Platform technology, cyber security assessments, digital forensics and incident response.

Key findings of the survey include:

• Security leaders rely on MSS because:
  • It improves their cybersecurity posture (59 percent)
  • Finding and retaining in-house top talent is a challenge (58 percent)
  • They lack in-house technology (57 percent)
• 54 percent of MSS users reported that in the last year, their provider found software exploitation more than three months old on their network
• 73 percent asserted it's essential or very important that their provider has a high level of interoperability with the company's security intelligence tools
• 59 percent agree that responsibility for the vendor relationship is shifting from the IT department to the line of business, indicating cybersecurity has become a boardroom concern
• Insufficient personnel and lack of in-house experts are the top challenges to a robust security posture for security leaders

Don't Wait: The Evolution of Proactive Threat Hunting was conducted by Ponemon Institute in April 2016. The margin of error for the survey was plus or minus four percentage points at a 95-percent confidence level.

For the complete report, please visit www.raytheoncyber.com/DontWaitHunt.

About Raytheon
Raytheon Company, with 2015 sales of $23 billion and 61,000 employees, is a technology and innovation leader specializing in defense, civil government and cybersecurity solutions. With a history of innovation spanning 94 years, Raytheon provides state-of-the-art electronics, mission systems integration, C5I™ products and services, sensing, effects, and mission support for customers in more than 80 countries. Raytheon is headquartered in Waltham, Mass. Visit us at www.raytheon.com and follow us on Twitter @Raytheon.

About Ponemon Institute 
Ponemon Institute was founded in 2002 by Dr. Larry Ponemon. Headquartered in Michigan, Ponemon Institute is considered the pre-eminent research center dedicated to privacy, data protection and information security policy. Ponemon Institute's annual consumer studies on privacy trust are widely quoted in the media and the organization's research quantifying the cost of a data breach has become valuable to organizations seeking to understand the business impact of lost or stolen data. 

For more information, please visit: http://www.ponemon.org/.

This document does not contain technology or technical data controlled under either the U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations or the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Ref# E16-M443.

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SOURCE Raytheon Company

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