Sixty per cent of enterprise security lacks signatures for new threats

Research shows most organisations in the dark over emerging threats

An enormous 60 per cent of the enterprise say their top IT security challenge is "finding new, unknown threats for which their current security doesn't have signatures".

This is a finding in research by cyber security firm Carbon Black, which also found that, while traditional antivirus can only stop and prevent known malware attacks, such attacks now only account for 30 per cent of attacks in 2018.

"As new attacks emerge, vendors must react quickly to identify the attack's signature and provide you with a signature-pack update to defend against it - which is a process that could take days or weeks to resolve," says the report.

"This leaves your organisation highly vulnerable, as attackers are innovating rapidly and utilizing advanced capabilities to easily get into your environment."

Carbon Black posits a possible solution in the use of big data analytics in security, which the firm argues is "your best opportunity to fully protect your organisation".

"By capturing real-time activity data from all your endpoints and analyzing it for malicious behavior, the cloud effectively creates a global threat monitoring system," says Carbon Black.

"With sophisticated machine learning and analytic processes that study behaviors, file reputations, threat feeds and other sources of information, the cloud proactively identifies anomalies as they occur."

The report also points out that 55 per cent of the enterprise admit that it takes "three or more hours" for each company endpoint to remediate a threat.

"Even when you have the information you need about an incident and you know what steps you need to take in order to address it, traditional systems can still slow you down. Without built-in operational tools to address security issues, you are forced to move into completely separate tools, often owned by entirely different teams," finds the report.

To find out more, read Carbon Black's full paper, entitled Endpoint Security Problems and How the Cloud Solves Them.