A joint OPSWAT, F5, and Dark Reading survey has highlighting significant industry concerns among IT and corporate leadership regarding their organization’s preparedness to face escalating cyber threats. Many enterprises are challenged with the complexities of web application security, compliance issues, and the perceived lack of support from organizational leadership.
The survey found that over the past year, 35% of respondents reported suffering a malware breach, 28% experienced credential theft or unauthorized account access, and 24% faced a security compromise involving a vendor, contractor, or other third party.
Other key findings include:
Lack of preparedness for escalating attacks: a mere 25% of respondents feel their organizations are fully prepared to handle DDoS attacks, which have been on the rise globally. Preparedness for other threats such as advanced persistent threats (APTs), botnets, API security issues, and zero-day malware is even lower.
Despite awareness of the necessary strategies, the report highlights a significant gap in implementation. While CISA recommends a defense-in-depth approach—utilizing multiple countermeasures in a layered manner, such as sandboxing, content disarm and reconstruction (CDR), behavior analysis, vulnerability scanning, and security testing — only 17% of organizations have fully implemented these strategies. This leaves 83% of companies vulnerable, lacking the comprehensive, multi-layered security needed to defend against today’s sophisticated threats.
Perceived lack of support from leadership: IT leaders report feeling under-resourced, with the top concerns preventing them from feeling adequately prepared for security threats being budget shortages, inadequacies in staff training and technical partnerships, disparate security ecosystems and vendors, and a general lack of attention from top management.
