FEATURE : DATA SECURITY
The result is a patchwork of incompatible tools that cause more problems than they solve . Data correlation is difficult , there are multiple ‘ blind spots ’, and the amount of alerts generated – and proportion of false positives – is leading organizations to disable automated threat blocking capabilities within the tools , or in some cases the tools themselves . The ESG study shows attackers are exploiting this to slip into many large Australian business environments undetected .
Nine out of ten Australian organizations experienced at least 10 attacks on their web applications and APIs in the past year that went undetected by security tools until they had a negative impact of some kind . For a quarter of Australian respondents , the negative impacts included legal problems , compliance issues , a loss of revenue or brand damage . For one in five respondents , the breaches led to downtime and customer experience impacts .
The type of attacks varied but included exploitation of the OWASP Top Ten ( experienced by 31 % of respondents ) and zero-days ( 29 %), malware infections ( 33 %), account take-over 24 %) and cloud service misconfiguration ( 21 %). Outdated security offerings , alert fatigue and ineffective blocking are among the cracks in organizations ’ security armour that allowed these incidents to slip through .
Australian organizations surveyed prefer security tools that can detect and block potential attacks automatically but say their existing tools block too much legitimate business traffic when in this mode of operation . The overblocking impacted customer experience ( for 40 % of Australian respondents ), wasted time ( 40 %), led to system downtime or undetected attacks ( 37 %), caused loss of revenue ( 30 %) or led to a failure to meet service level agreements ( 21 %). Many Australian organizations chose to disable blocking or to limit its use to certain windows of time or application traffic types in order to mitigate against these potential impacts .
“ One of the biggest security challenges we are seeing today is that technologies are rapidly evolving to better serve the growing demand for digital experiences , but the security offerings that protect those technologies are not experiencing that same level of transformation – and often erode the benefits of modern technology stacks ,” said Kelly Shortridge , Senior Principal Technologist at Fastly .
“ Security tools should fuel innovation , actively support service resilience and minimize disruption to software delivery workflows , rather than slowing build cycles and producing disjointed , unactionable or irrelevant data .”
More than three-quarters of Australian respondents recognized an appropriate long-term response would be an overhaul of their security tooling and approach , moving to an evolved and consolidated web application and API security solution from a single vendor .
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