Fighting Fire With Fire: Research Reveals Cybersecurity Strategies Are Suffering as a Result of Complexity

November 30, 2022 at 03:00 AM EST

Nearly three quarters of organizations worldwide are increasing cybersecurity spending, despite 60% believing they already spend enough.

Research released today by Fastly, Inc. (NYSE: FSLY), the world’s fastest global edge cloud platform, finds that nearly three quarters (73%) of organizations worldwide are increasing their cybersecurity spending to protect themselves against future risks. However, despite their increased budget, IT leaders are investing poorly with only 61% of their cybersecurity tools fully active or deployed. In the US, only 67% of cybersecurity tools are fully deployed. Similarly, due to a scattergun approach to cybersecurity implementation, 42% of security tools overlap, protecting organizations against the same threats. And, when these tools do run, they often suffer from too many false positives. For example, 38% of alerts detected by organizations’ Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) are false positives.

Sean Leach, Chief Product Architect - Fastly, commented, ‘These stats paint a picture of cybersecurity strategies fuelled by fear. Businesses are well aware of the dire repercussions of cybersecurity failure and, as a result, are looking to increase their security budgets. However, this increased spend is rarely driven by a key strategic goal. This means businesses often end up with solutions that aren’t fit for purpose and, in many cases, they run these tools in log-only mode for an extended period of time, which offers absolutely no protection.’

As part of Fastly’s 2022 security research report, IT leaders also predicted the biggest threats to their organization in the next 12 months – 32% highlighting data breaches and data loss, 29% malware and 26% phishing as their key areas for concern. Comparatively, in research carried out in 2021 by Fastly in the UK, the top threats identified by organizations were malware, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and bad actors targeting known vulnerabilities. This change represents a significant year-on-year shift towards threats based upon social engineering with individual employees targeted by bad actors.

The other primary area of concern for these organizations is securing remote workers. 46% of IT leaders predict that cyber attacks on remote workers will drive cybersecurity threats over the next twelve months, and more than a third (38%) have made protecting the new hybrid workforce their main priority for the coming year.

Leach continued: ‘If businesses get the fundamentals of cybersecurity right – such as non-SMS based two-factor authentication, rigid authorization rules, rate limiting to control sent or received requests when needed, and comprehensive security training across all parts of the organization – they are able to defend against the majority of the most common threats, particularly potential data breaches. These basic steps go a long way to preventing severe financial and data losses and should be priorities for all businesses, regardless of size. This approach also resolves the question of what to do with remote workers. By adopting these measures, an individual employee’s location no longer matters for your business’ cybersecurity posture, meaning there is no need for concern around remote work. After all, hybrid work is here to stay, so businesses should be prepared to embrace it.’

The full report contains the five fundamental steps organizations can take to improve their cybersecurity posture, removing unnecessary complexity in the process. Download the full report here to discover these steps: https://learn.fastly.com/fighting-fire-with-fire.html

About the research

This research surveyed over 1,400 key IT decision makers in large organizations spanning multiple industries across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Japan.

About Fastly

Fastly’s powerful and programmable edge cloud platform helps the world’s top brands deliver the fastest online experiences possible, while improving site performance, enhancing security, and empowering innovation at global scale. With world-class support that achieves 95%+ average annual customer satisfaction ratings, Fastly’s beloved suite of edge compute, delivery, and security offerings has been recognized as a leader by industry analysts such as IDC, Forrester and Gartner. Compared to legacy providers, Fastly’s powerful and modern network architecture is the fastest on the planet, empowering developers to deliver secure websites and apps at global scale with rapid time-to-market and industry-leading cost savings. Thousands of the world’s most prominent organizations trust Fastly to help them upgrade the internet experience, including Reddit, Pinterest, Stripe, Neiman Marcus, The New York Times, Epic Games, and GitHub. Learn more about Fastly at https://www.fastly.com/, and follow us @fastly.