Darktrace, a provider of cybersecurity artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, announced a new IDC InfoBrief titled “Building the Case for a Virtuous Cycle in Cybersecurity.”

Sponsored by Darktrace, the research was conducted to identify the key challenges facing cybersecurity professionals operating in increasingly noisy cybersecurity environments, and the report outlines recommended solutions to bolster cyber readiness.

IDC conducted a survey of 300 organizations across the U.S. and Europe spanning multiple verticals including financial services, transportation and healthcare. The data revealed the key challenges facing most of these organizations concern the ability to effectively prioritize and contextualize the large amounts of data organizations get from several cybersecurity alert systems, as well as identifying the key actions necessary for effective mitigation of threats and vulnerabilities.

The study's key findings are:

• Evolving attack vectors make it difficult to prepare proactively, with only 31% of respondents highly confident that their tools can continuously adjust to new configurations
• There is a lack of dynamic testing capabilities, as 65% of participants agreed that pen testing provides only a snapshot in time which is of limited value, as it quickly becomes out of date
• While 76% of surveyed professionals thought visualizing attack paths was of moderate or high importance, only 29% were highly confident they had a robust mechanism to test their environments against the most current threat vectors
• The number of organizations that can continuously run preventative exercises such as pen tests and attack surface evaluation is between just 24% and 31% across all sectors

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The IDC InfoBrief calls for the adoption of a “virtuous cycle” model as a way of closing these critical security gaps, incorporating prevention, detection, response and healing. It calls for “a multipronged approach that includes establishing a security posture and proactively managing the access and assets, monitoring what is happening in the environment, and ensuring a fit-for-purpose remediation approach including backup and disaster recovery.”

The study also highlights AI as the solution for improved detection and response capabilities and continuous monitoring, as well as playing an integral part in the 'virtuous cycle', citing AI's ability to look for subtle changes in the behaviors of entities within a network.

“It's clear from this study that organizations need to adopt a holistic approach to improve their readiness,” said Christopher Kissel, research vice president of IDC's Security & Trust Products. “The solution is to create a virtuous cycle, leveraging AI to create an ecosystem across an entire organization able to continuously stress-test environments, give an instantaneous response, and determine if remediation is working.”

A pdf of the full report is available here.