The process of detecting, triaging, investigating, and containing a cyber incident takes organizations globally on average nearly seven days of working around the clock (totaling 162 hours), with an average of 31 hours to contain a cybersecurity incident once it has been detected and investigated, a CrowdStrike survey reveals.

How fast can you detect intruders?

As a result, the majority of respondents (80%) report that in the past 12 months, they have been unable to prevent intruders on their networks from accessing their targeted data, with 44% pointing to being too slow to detect intruders as the cause.

Vanson Bourne surveyed 1,900 senior IT decision-makers and IT security pros in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Mexico, Middle East, Australia, Germany, Japan, France, India and Singapore across major industry sectors.

According to the findings, organizations from major industry verticals around the globe are significantly underprepared to address breakout time. Breakout time is the critical window between when an intruder compromises the first machine and when they can move laterally to other systems on the network.

Forward-leaning organizations should look to follow the 1:10:60 rule: One minute to detect threats, ten minutes to investigate, and 60 minutes to contain and remediate an incident.

Notable report findings

Currently, 95% of respondents fall short of meeting the three time standards.

Only 11% of respondent organizations can detect intruders in under one minute, only 9% can investigate an incident in 10 minutes, only 33% can contain an incident in 60 minutes, and only 5% can do all three.

Intruder detection is the primary IT security focus for only 19% of respondents, despite 86% seeing one-minute detection as a cybersecurity “game-changer” for their organization.

Attack concerns

Organizations’ concerns about different types of attacks also differ across the report. Notable findings include:

The rise in the number of those who had experienced multiple supply chain attacks, including within the past year – this number doubled from 16 % to 34%. Yet, concerns surrounding supply chain attacks decreased on a global average from 33% in 2018 to 28% in 2019.

In the same vein, the number of organizations paying ransoms to retrieve data encrypted in a software supply chain attack also more than doubled from 14% to 40%. The report indicates that over 50% of the food and beverage, hospitality, and entertainment and media industries have paid ransoms in the past 12 months in order to recover data encrypted in a software supply chain attack.

An average of 83% of respondents believe that nation-state sponsored attacks pose a clear danger to organizations within their country, with India (97%), Singapore (92%) and the U.S. (84%) experiencing the most heightened sense of risk from nation-state threats.

“Organizations are challenged to achieve the kind of speed required to match sophisticated nation-state and ecrime adversaries known to be targeting organizations, from governments to enterprises,” said Thomas Etheridge, VP of CrowdStrike.

“There is still a significant reliance on legacy infrastructure that does not address security for today’s organizations from a holistic standpoint to stop breaches.

“Forward-leaning companies must embrace the cloud for endpoint security to give their teams comprehensive visibility and crowdsourced protection to address effectively a full range of security and operational needs.”