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Global corporate spending on cybersecurity is growing faster than anticipated. Recent estimates point to a nearly 15% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2022 to 2023, compared to earlier estimates that projected a CAGR of 8.2% between 2020 and 2025. This accelerated rise may come as no surprise given several factors: the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, continued COVID-19 recovery, global economic uncertainties, and an ever-expanding attack surface.
To understand where threat intelligence fits in companies’ overall cybersecurity strategy, we recently spoke to more than 100 cyber threat intelligence (CTI) practitioners and managers from around the globe*. As part of our discussions, we asked them what their organizational CTI objectives are and their biggest challenges in leveraging CTI to protect their companies from an attack. We also asked about their level of satisfaction with CTI in accomplishing important tasks, and how many CTI tools are in use at their organization. The results revealed a few surprises, and also affirmed our belief about the value of actionable cyber intelligence in cybercrime prevention.
For example, both security leaders and those on the front lines of cyber defense identified the top three objectives as:
Understanding the earliest indications of an organization’s cyber risk
Identifying compromised credentials
Assessing an organization’s threat exposure
In other words, security professionals across all levels believe that threat intelligence is critical in identifying a company’s greatest vulnerabilities, and is an important first step in determining how to stop an attack before it happens.
Threat intelligence practitioners and leaders also share similar views regarding the top challenges of CTI. Their responses show that data aggregation and the ability to recognize trends can be difficult, particularly when multiple threat intelligence tools are used, which can also lead to analyst fatigue and prevent the successful use of CTI. It’s worth noting that Cybersixgill users generally fall in the group of respondents who said they use only one CTI tool, which indicates that our proactive dark web monitoring and threat intelligence provides the most comprehensive value over other CTI vendors.
The survey results are available for you to download and review, so you can see how the industry views CTI as a whole and where the challenges and opportunities lie as you assess your organization’s CTI program.
* Respondents were primarily from North America (47%) and Europe (30%), with others from LATAM, APAC, Israel, and India. Roughly 68% of respondents were cyber security practitioners, operating as cyber threat analysts, threat hunters, and security investigators. Approximately 32% were at the management level and above, including CISOs, SOC managers, Chief Risk Officers, Vice Presidents of Technology, security architects, and others.
Cybersixgill automatically aggregates data leaks and alerts customers in real time.
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