By Scott Gordon, Chief Marketing Officer
Over 80% of cyber breaches result from external threat actors conducting phishing, session hijacking, account takeover, and ransomware attacks, putting organizations under mounting pressure to improve their security posture and automate cyber response. This increase in successful attacks stems from an extended attack surface, vulnerable internet-facing assets and susceptible users, and increased coordination and advancement of cyber-attack methods.
Threat Intelligence Management (TIM) and External Attack Surface Management (EASM) are core technologies for security teams to fortify their security posture, increase threat response efficiency, and improve cyber resiliency. Where is the industry today? How are cyber security professionals addressing external exposures and attacks? Where, what, and how is threat intelligence being used to respond to cyber risks? That was the objective of a new 2024 State of Attack Surface Threat Intelligence report – to provide a better understanding of the key cyber security microtrends impacting businesses today.
We sponsored this new research last month by Cybersecurity Insiders, a community membership of over 600,000 information technology (IT) security professionals. The online survey drew over 300 qualified respondents, from U.S. organizations with over 1000 employees and across industries, that either manage external attack surface management programs and teams or are security operations and analyst team members that use threat intelligence and EASM tools daily.
Plenty of useful findings into the challenges, advances, maturity, and best practices for managing external attack surface risk. The survey found that nearly all respondents indicated an increase in impactful attack surface incidents – nearly a third expressed significant increases. Two-thirds of respondents rated their attack surface intelligence tools as only nominally effective, where security analysts were a third less positive about their tool use compared to senior management.
Half of U.S. enterprises have immature external attack surface management (EASM) programs. Large organizations (over 2,500 employees) appear twice as likely to have mature programs than smaller organizations – which may be attributed to having more resources and investment.
On the positive front, budgets for EASM programs are on the rise with 90% expecting increased investment in EASM tools and threat intelligence – with 40% of respondents anticipate a budget increase over 20% compared to the previous year. Additional findings include:
- 90% of organizations experienced an increase in impactful attack surface incidents.
- 84% of respondents expressed attack surface dynamics contributing to security incidents.
- 33% are in more advanced stages of EASM programs, where the top near-term program objectives are to improve threat responsiveness and asset inventory accuracy.
Check out more findings in the full report, which is available at www.tacitred.com/asm2024rpt. For a quick overview, the summary infographic can be downloaded at www.tacitred.com/asm2024inf.
