Cyber security is a top concern among U.K. businesses, but enterprises still struggle with keeping their organizations safe.
That’s one of the takeaways from the U.K. government’s Security Breaches Survey 2016, which looks at the impacts of attacks and hacks on 1,000 of the country’s businesses.
Nearly seventy percent of respondents said security is either a very high or fairly high priority for their organization’s senior managers. That figure was even higher among large businesses, with 90 percent of them calling security a high priority area.
While enterprises realize the importance of cyber security, adversaries proved very successful at infiltrating U.K. companies over the last 12 months. During that time, 65 percent of the U.K.’s largest business have detected either a breach or an attack while 25 percent of those companies experienced at least one breach a month, according to the survey,
Organizations should consider that a breach is inevitable despite their best defensive efforts. Motivated hackers will always find a way around firewalls, antivirus software and other protective measures. By using behavioral analysis instead of traditional security tools, companies would be able to immediately detect and shut down an attack, mitigating the hackers’ damage.
Hackers are increasingly turning to advanced persistent threats to exfiltrate data. Attack campaigns have multiple components, some of which are meant to deceive security teams and allow the operation to persist for as long as possible. This could explain why a quarter of survey respondents said they experience at least one breach every month. Instead of individual breaches, these incidents could all be part of the same operation that a security team failed to fully shut down.
Businesses offered mixed opinions on the type of data that would be of interest to attackers. One company assumed that it was safe from hackers since it lacked financial data. In reality, any type of data can has value to some entity. Nation-states, for example, will often steal intellectual property to advance the research and development efforts of business in that country.
Adversaries will use any means necessary to complete their mission, including attacking organizations that allow them to reach their ultimate targett. This point wasn’t lost on one organization that was surveyed. The business, a video production company, realized that some of it’s client work, which included videos on product launches, could be damaging if publicly disclosed.
In fact, hackers used this tactic to breach Target. Instead of directly attacking the retailer, adversaries went after the service provider that handled maintenance for Target’s heating, cooling and ventilation system.
Modern security means realizing even the most protected organizations will get hacked. Any company in any industry is susceptible to a data breach. But by using technology like automated hunting to detect threats in a company's IT environment, organizations can fight back against attackers.
Fred O'Connor is Cybereason's senior content writer.