IT leaders acknowledge that there is a blind spot in the visibility of the attack surface: Report

Despite investing in cybersecurity, many Canadian organizations and their global peers have problems with the visibility of IT systems, complicating their ability to protect critical data. I admit.

Almost two-thirds (62%) of all respondents (including 60% of Canadian participants) according to a recent global survey of 6,297 IT and business decision makers in 29 countries by Trend Micro. ) Admits that there is a blind spot in the trial. To secure their attack surface.

Cloud assets are listed as the area with the lowest organizational insight (37% of all respondents, 41% in Canada), including networks (34% globally) and end-user assets (29% globally). Continue.

Almost three-quarters of all respondents are concerned about the size of the digital attack surface, and 31% say they are “extremely concerned.” 43% say the attack surface is out of control.

This number is included in an investigation into why organizations have problems managing cyber risk called digital attack surface mapping.

Greg Young, vice president of cybersecurity and corporate development at Trend Micro Canada, said the good news is the large number of participants admitting that there are visibility issues. At least the authorities haven’t denied that there is a problem.

“Unfortunately, technology is changing so much that there are many blind spots,” he said in an interview.

“I think what happened is the interest in point solutions and the fixation of James Bond. [protecting against] Zero-day attacks are very unhealthy.We saw this in some [security vendor] When technology changes such as the cloud and IoT are major challenges, companies over-rotate marketing and scare tactics such as zero-day attacks.

“Currently, positively inclined organizations are investing time and money in managing the attack surface.”-Both external and internal-“And then can you get a complete picture of the risk?”

In other findings, nearly half of all respondents say cloud asset misconfiguration is their greatest risk exposure.

This reflects the fact that cloud security is different from IT security, Young said. It also becomes even more difficult to manage as your organization moves to a multi-cloud environment. He added that it doesn’t help that each cloud platform has its own tools for operations and security.

“There are some great technologies to solve most of the cloud misconfigurations. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) has been around for years and works very well for many problems. … This is one of the cases where you need to use automation and use machine learning to check and fix many issues. ”

According to Young, the most disappointing answer in this survey was that only 44% of respondents said phishing email was the primary way to launch a cyberattack. Trend Micro believes that the majority of attacks begin with phishing. “Obviously, we need to do more work there,” Young said.

According to the report, the ultimate goal of gaining visibility and control of the digital attack surface is ultimately to better understand and manage cyber risk.

Advise IT and security leaders as follows:

– Gain visibility of all assets and attack vectors.

– Use that data to continuously calculate risk exposure.

– Then invest in proper management to mitigate that risk.