The sharing mentality is starting to take hold across the cybersecurity industry, with the vast majority of security decision-makers confessing that they would be willing to share threat intelligence, according to a new publication by IronNet.
The report, Collective Offense Calls for Collective Defense: A Reality Check for Cybersecurity Decision Makers, surveyed 200 U.S. security IT decision-makers. Of those, 94% stated that their organization would be willing to increase the level of threat sharing with their industry peers if it demonstrably improved their ability to detect threats.
Additionally, 92% of respondents said they would even increase threat sharing with the government if it meant the government could use political, economic, cyber, or other national-level capabilities to deter cyber-attacks, the report said.
As nation-state attacks become more prevalent, threat actors are collaborating on techniques to make their attacks more profitable, leaving individual security teams to defend themselves against a collective offense.
The report also found that organizations are suffering an average of one cybersecurity incident every three months, with 80% saying the incident was so severe that it required C-level and/or board meetings afterward.
“Despite most IT decision makers’ reported confidence that their cybersecurity capabilities are advanced and in better shape than others in their industry (55%), they nonetheless experienced an average of four attacks on their organization over a 12 month period, with 20% of respondents being hit six or more times,” the report said.
“Organizations are increasingly grasping the need for better threat information sharing. Half of decision makers surveyed noted that their threat sharing tool could be improved upon, and 46% identified a need for enhanced sharing of cyber attacker tools, tactics, and procedures (TTP) and faster sharing of raw intelligence at network speed. The lack of such protections magnified the damage from recent attacks like Hydro Norsk, NotPetya, and others that quickly spread from company to company and could have been mitigated by better collective defense.”