Singapore firms take 118 hours to detect, contain cyber attacks
Businesses in Singapore take an average of 118 hours to detect and respond to security breaches, including 63 hours to detect intruders in their network and eight hours before a team is assigned to determine a remedy. They then require 10 hours to fully investigate the breach and another 37 hours to contain and respond to the cybersecurity breach.
Worldwide, on average, organisations took 162 hours, or just under seven days, to detect and respond to breaches, according to a CrowdStrike survey, which polled 1,900 senior IT decision makers and security professionals across 11 markets, including Japan, Australia, India, the UK, and the US. Some 100 respondents were based in Singapore. The study was conducted by market research firm Vanson Bourne.
Across the board, organisations needed 31 hours on average to contain a breach after it had been detected and investigated. This meant that 80% were unable to stop intruders in their network from accessing targeted data over the past 12 months, with 44% attributing the reason for this to their tardiness in detecting a breach.
In Singapore, 48% of respondents were able to identify the attackers following a breach, while 92% viewed nation-state attacks as the highest threat to cybersecurity. Another 17% of cybersecurity teams in the country treated the detection of intruders on their network as a priority.
CrowdStrike recommends a defence model it calls the 1-10-60 rule, in which enterprises should be able to detect a breach in 1 minute, investigate it within 10 minutes, and remediate the issue within 60 minutes.
However, the security vendor noted, 95% of enterprises across all markets did not meet any of these three time rules, with only 11% able to detect intruders under one minute. Just 9% could investigate a breach in 10 minutes, while 33% were able to contain an incident in an hour.
On average, respondents took 120 hours to detect a cybersecurity incident.
Across the board, 32% cited difficulty in securing or upgrading legacy systems as a reason for their inability to detect a breach more quickly. Another 30% pointed to a lack of resources in the cybersecurity team, while 28% noted that shadow IT made it challenging to detect breaches.
According to the study, the number of companies that reported attacks on supply chains doubled to 34% this past year, up from 16%. More also paid ransoms to recover data encrypted in a software supply chain attack, more than doubling from 14% to 40%. In fact, more than half of companies in food and beverage, hospitality, and entertainment and media industries did so in the past year.
In addition, 83% of respondents worldwide saw nation-state sponsored attacks as a clear danger to organisations in their domestic market, including 97% in India and 84% in the US.
CrowdStrike Services' vice president Thomas Etheridge said: "The study clearly shows organisations are severely lacking in their abilities to not only detect and prevent an attack, but also to respond to and remediate the incident. In fact, 95% of respondents acknowledge that something more needs to be done to prevent a breakout once an intruder is in the network.
"A reliance on legacy infrastructure, exacerbated by a lack of resources and expertise, has hampered organisations' abilities to mount an effective defence against the adversaries they face," Etheridge said.
He urged companies to adopt the cloud for endpoint security so their IT teams had comprehensive visibility and "crowdsourced protection" to more effectively address their security and operational needs.
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