More than 60 percent of organizations not leveraging established hardening benchmarks.
Tripwire, Inc., a leading global provider of security and compliance solutions for enterprises and industrial organizations, today released its State of Cyber Hygiene report. The survey, conducted in July in partnership with Dimensional Research, included responses from 306 IT security professionals.
Tripwire examined how organizations are implementing security controls that the Center for Internet Security (CIS) refers to as “Cyber Hygiene.” The survey found that almost two-thirds of the organizations admit they do not use hardening benchmarks, like CIS or Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) guidelines, to establish a secure baseline.
“These industry standards are one way to leverage the broader community, which is important with the resource constraints that most organizations experience,” said Tim Erlin, vice president of product management and strategy at Tripwire. “It’s surprising that so many respondents aren’t using established frameworks to provide a baseline for measuring their security posture. It’s vital to get a clear picture of where you are so that you can plan a path forward.”
Tripwire’s State of Cyber Hygiene report explores how organizations are implementing cybersecurity practices related to network visibility, vulnerability management, configuration management, administrative privileges and logging.
Other key findings in the report include:
Many organizations still struggle to maintain visibility of their environments and quickly address unauthorized potential issues. Attackers may only need minutes on a network to launch a successful attack, yet 57 percent said it takes hours, weeks, months or longer to detect new devices connecting to their organization’s network.
Forty percent of organizations are not scanning for vulnerabilities weekly or on a more frequent basis despite recommendations, and only half run the more comprehensive authenticated scans. It takes 27 percent of organizations anywhere from a month to more than one year to deploy a security patch.
Fifty-four percent are not collecting logs from all critical systems into a central location, and 97 percent believe they need to get more efficient at checking logs. About 25 percent said they were not efficient at all, while another 73 percent said they were fairly efficient but could improve.
Most organizations implement good basic protections around administrative privileges, but as low-hanging fruit, these controls should be in place at more organizations. Thirty-one percent of organizations still do not require default passwords to be changed, and 41 percent still don’t use multifactor authentication for accessing administrative accounts.
“When cyberattacks make the news, it can be tempting to think a new shiny tool is needed to protect your environment against those threats, but that’s often not the case,” said Erlin. “Many of the most impactful and widespread cybersecurity issues stem from a lack of getting the basics right. Cyber hygiene provides the foundational breadth necessary to manage risk in a changing landscape, and it should be the highest priority cybersecurity investment.”
To view the full State of Cyber Hygiene report, please visit: Click Here
