Bethany Alvaro 
A recent CyberEdge Group research examined the positions of global IT leaders to uncover the scale of cyber attack knowledge and solutions, finding that 46 per cent of them face difficulty in managing cyber attacks.
Data and intellectual property theft was the highest reported concern in cyber attacks, cited by 57 per cent of respondents.
Though 95 per cent said they are confident and assured in detecting a cyber attack, 51 per cent said that isolating attacked systems can take anywhere from hours to weeks, leaving the scale of the attack to dramatically grow.
“Containment delayed is containment lost,” said Steve Piper, founder and CEO of CyberEdge Group.
“Only a small minority of organisations can isolate compromised workloads in near real time, while more than half are operating on a scale of hours or days.
“That delay creates a critical window where attackers can move laterally, escalate privileges, and significantly increase the impact of a breach.”
In terms of threat priority and what is deemed to be the biggest challenge changing the way cyber attacks are conducted, identified, and managed, it is, unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence (AI).
In the survey, “AI-enabled tactics”, such as deepfakes and AI impersonation methods, were among the top three threats as reported by 55 per cent of respondents.
“Most organisations can spot an intrusion, but stopping it is a different story,” said Raghu Nandakumara, director at cyber breach and security company, Illumio.
“AI is making attacks harder to interpret and contain, which means even small footholds can escalate fast.”
Nandakumara said that microsegmentation is a growing and effective security method in which traffic is blocked between systems and applications.
This allows for stronger detection and response to an attack, with Nandakumara saying it “is one of the few controls that enhances visibility and limits how far an intruder can move, but only when it’s precise, scalable, and consistently applied”.