Raytheon releases study on company satisfaction with IT security providers

Results of a Raytheon-commissioned study released on Monday found that organizations worldwide wait until they fall victim to a damaging cyber attack before engaging a provider of managed security services (MSS).

Two-thirds of survey respondents indicated that their organizations were reluctant to engage a vendor until they have experienced significant data loss from an IT security breach.

The survey, entitled “Don’t Wait: The Evolution of Proactive Threat Hunting,” surveyed 1,784 information security leaders in 19 countries about outsourcing network security activities. The survey also revealed that organizations are seeking more from their existing providers, including firewalls, intrusion detection and virtual private networks.

“Cybersecurity is not a waiting game, and organizations without the expertise and tools required to identify and respond to skilled adversaries need to understand that,” Jack Harrington, vice president of cybersecurity and special missions at Raytheon Intelligence, Information and Services, said. “The old approach waited for technology to flag known threats. In contrast, skilled hunters like those on our team proactively seek emerging threats and stop them before businesses suffer damage.”

Eighty-eight percent of respondents said that MSS is important to their overall security strategy, while 84 percent percent said that their provider did not offer proactive hunting services even though they effectively find the most insidious threats impacting their data.

“There is only one way to find the most sophisticated, damaging cyber threats attacking a company’s network: proactively hunt for them,” David Amsler, president of Raytheon Foreground Security, said. “Too many organizations today rely on reactive models and automated tools that attempt to detect threats through signature-, rule- or sandbox-driven models. The reactive approach is not enough to stop the determined and sophisticated adversaries which are most often the cause of significant damage or data loss.”