"A Crisis of Confidence Among Security Pros"

[Venustus]

New report shows that a majority of security professionals worldwide doubt they can stop or quell attacks.

There's a sense of unease among security professionals around the globe on how well they can truly protect their organizations from cyberattacks, a new report finds.

Some 57% of security pros say their organizations aren't protected from advanced attacks, and 63% don’t think they can stop confidential information from leaking out of the enterprise, a new report by the Ponemon Institute says. Nearly 70 percent say they believe threats slip by their installed security systems.

Ponemon surveyed 4,881 IT and IT security practitioners in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, the UK, and the US, for the report. Some 44% say they had been hit with one or more "substantial" attack over the past year.

Existing security products don't provide much help, either, in more than half of the organizations, and 59% say they don't have sufficient intelligence about attacks or are unsure about the impact of them.

The responses in the report may be the result of the realization that attacks are inevitable, as well as a touch of pessimism, according to Jeff Debrosse, director of security research at Websense, which commissioned the report. "The very fact that a large percentage of the respondents -- 69% -- believe that their existing security systems are missing some of the attacks means that the false sense of security is decreasing. The idea of 'no silver bullet' is taking hold, and more organizations are realizing that one or two point solutions just aren’t going to cut it."
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