UK firms taking two weeks to detect advanced threats

A quarter of UK respondents to Intel Security-backed survey admit it took them more than a fortnight to identify an advanced attack last year

A quarter of UK businesses took more than two weeks to discover they were suffering an advanced cyberattack in 2014.

That's one of the findings of a survey commissioned by Intel Security which quizzed IT and security professionals at 700 mid-market and enterprise businesses in the UK and Europe, as well as the Americas and Asia.

On average, respondents indicated that their firms conducted 78 security investigations last year, 28 per cent of which were focused on targeted attacks.

Some 25 per cent of those questioned said it took more than a fortnight to detect they were suffering an advanced cyberthreat last year.

The figure was similar for other countries, standing at 25 per cent in France and 35 per cent in the US.

For 39 per cent of respondents, a threat, once discovered, took between two and 12 weeks to remove and remediate.

Raj Samani, EMEA CTO at Intel Security, claimed end users have a "golden hour" in which to detect and deflect an attack if they are to minimise damage to their organisation.

"It's worrying to see that companies in the UK and globally are losing out on critical time in the initial onset of an attack – when immediate action is crucial," he said.

"Hackers don't hang around; as soon as they identify a vulnerability within a corporate network, they will be working to spread this as far as possible throughout the enterprise, wreaking havoc and compromising data along the way."

Some 78 per cent of UK respondents said a lack of communication between their firm's security tools could be slowing down its ability to react to cyberthreats, according to the survey, which was carried out by the Enterprise Strategy Group.

Some 39 per cent said they are in need of better automated analytics from their security intelligence tools to gain better security visibility. Meanwhile, 80 per cent believed their organisation suffers from a shortage of IT security skills among staff.