AI adoption increases in cybersecurity to tackle advanced adversaries: Study

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be leveraged as part of defender stratagems as more organizations lock horns with sophisticated cyberattacks and become more resilient, according to Wipro’s State of Cybersecurity Report (SOCR), which presents changing perspectives of cybersecurity globally. There has been an increase in R&D with 49% of the worldwide cybersecurity related patents filed in the last four years being focused on AI and Machine Learning (ML) application. Nearly half the organizations are expanding cognitive detection capabilities to tackle unknown attacks in their Security Operations Center (SOC).

The report also illustrates a paradigm shift towards cyber resilience amid the rise in global remote work. It considers the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on cybersecurity landscape around the globe and provides a path for organizations to adapt with this new normal.

The fourth edition of the SOCR saw a global participation of 194 organizations and 21 partner academic, institutional and technology organizations over four months of research.

Additional highlights from study include:

Global macro trends in cyber security

• Nation state attacks target private sector: 86% of all nation-state attacks fall under espionage category, and 46% of them are targeted towards private companies.
• Evolving threat patterns have emerged in the consumer and retail sectors: 47% of suspicious social media profiles and domains were detected active in 2019 in these sectors.

Cyber trends sparked by COVID-19 pandemic

• Cyber hygiene proven difficult during remote work enablement: 70% of the organizations faced challenges in maintaining endpoint cyber hygiene and 57% in mitigating Virtual Private Network (VPN) and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) risks.
• Emerging post-COVID cybersecurity priorities: 87% of the surveyed organizations are keen on implementing zero trust architecture and 87% are planning to scale up secure cloud migration.

Micro trends: An inside-out enterprise view

• Low confidence in cyber resilience: 59% of the organizations understand their cyber risks but only 23% of them are highly confident about preventing cyberattacks.
• Strong cybersecurity spend due to board oversight & regulations: 14% of organizations have a security budget of more than 12% of their overall IT budgets.

Micro trends: Best cyber practices to emulate

• Laying the foundation for a cognitive SOC: 49% of organizations are adding cognitive detection capabilities to their SOC to tackle unknown attacks.
• Concerns about OT infrastructure attacks increasing: 65% of organizations are performing log monitoring of Operation Technology (OT) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices as a control to mitigate increased OT risks.

Meso trends: An overview on collaboration

• Fighting cyber-attacks demands stronger collaboration: 57% of organizations are willing to share only Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) and 64% consider reputational risks to be a barrier to information sharing.
• Cyber-attack simulation exercises serve as a strong wakeup call: 60% participate in cyber simulation exercises coordinated by Industry regulators, National Computer Emergency Response Team (CERTs) and third-party service providers and 79% organizations have dedicated cyber insurance policy in place.

Future of cybersecurity

• 5G security is the emerging area for patent filing: 7% of the worldwide patents filed in the cyber domain in the last four years have been related to 5G security.

Vertical insights by industry

• Banking, Financial Services & Insurance: 70% of financial services enterprises said that new regulations are fuelling increase in security budgets, with 54% attributing higher budgets to board intervention.
• Communications: 71% of organizations consider cloud-hosting risk as a top risk.
• Consumer: 86% of consumer businesses said email phishing is a top risk and 75% enterprises said a bad cyber event will lead to damaged band reputation in the marketplace.
• Healthcare & Life Sciences: 83% of healthcare organizations have highlighted maintaining endpoint cyber hygiene as a challenge, 71% have highlighted that breaches reported by peers has led to increased security budget allocation.
• Energy, Natural Resources and Utilities: 71% organizations reported that OT/IT integration would bring new risks. 
• Manufacturing: 58% said that they are not confident about preventing risks from supply chain providers.

Bhanumurthy B.M, President and Chief Operating Officer, Wipro said, “There is a significant shift in global trends like rapid innovation to mitigate evolving threats, strict data privacy regulations and rising concern about breaches.  Security is ever changing and the report brings more focus, enablement, and accountability on executive management to stay updated. Our research not only focuses on what happened during the pandemic but also provides foresight toward future cyber strategies in a post-COVID world”.