Introduction
CyberEdge Group’s sixth annual Cyberthreat Defense Report provides a penetrating look at how IT security professionals perceive cyberthreats and plan to defend against them. Based on a survey of 1,200 IT security decision makers and practitioners conducted in November 2018, the report delivers countless insights IT security teams can use to better understand how their perceptions, priorities, and security postures stack up against those of their peers.
Notable Findings
- Cyberthreat trifecta. Of 11 categories of cyberthreats, malware is the greatest concern for responding organizations, followed closely by phishing and ransomware (see Figure 1).
- Healthy security budgets. The average security budget is increasing 4.9% in 2019 and
represents 12.5% of an organization’s overall budget for IT. - Threat hunting obstacle. The top inhibitor to achieving effective threat-hunting capabilities is
the difficulty organizations are having implementing or integrating related tools. - Security’s most wanted. Advanced security analytics tops the list as the #1 security technology planned for acquisition in 2019.
- Worsening skills shortage. More than four in five organizations (84.2%) are experiencing
a shortfall of skilled IT security personnel, with the education (91.3%) and finance (87.5%)
segments being the hardest hit.
