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Australian boards are learning the hard way that more expertise is needed to combat growing cyber threats.
There are a lot of bad things that come from experiencing a cyber attack. A business may have lost data, brand reputation, and likely not a small amount of money.
But a new report is also showing that it’s not until an organisation does get hacked that real, positive change can start to occur when it comes to cyber security.
Cyber security firm Trellix has released its Mind of the CISO: Behind the Breach report, and one of the key findings of the survey is that it’s only after an attack that company boards start to take security seriously. In fact, it found that 60 per cent of Australian businesses are likely to create new roles and hire more staff in the wake of an attack.
The Trellix survey polled 500 chief information security officers from around the world, including Australia, all of whom were from businesses that had suffered at least one hack in the last five years.
In Australia, 43 per cent of CISOs reported that they were able to add new contract services – such as incident response – following an incident, while 40 per cent saw their technology budgets increase.
“The biggest learning is the awareness had to be raised at the board level … unfortunately, it had to take an incident to do so,” said one Australian government agency CISO in response to the survey.
Luke Power, managing director Australia and New Zealand at Trellix, sees the issue as indicative of a wider problem when it comes to responding to a growing threat landscape.
“Today’s CISO has a considerable task on their hands in keeping out hackers who are continually becoming more sophisticated in the way they perform cyber attacks,” Power said in a statement. “As threats evolve, it is encouraging to see that Australian businesses are doubling down on bringing in the right expertise to support security leaders in preventing major cyber incidents.”
The survey also revealed the scope of the threats faced by Australian CISOs. Data theft is a problem for 53 per cent of respondents, while malware threats challenge 40 per cent of security specialists. Ransomware rounds out the top trifecta, with 23 per cent of organisations impacted.
As to what can be done to respond to the challenge, 37 per cent of CISOs feel that password misuse is the root cause of cyber incidents. However, a full third of CISOs believe that there is no one silver bullet when it comes to fixing their security posture, believing instead that only a “complete overhaul” in policies and structure is an adequate solution.
You can read the full Mind of the CISO: Behind the Breach report here.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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