Security teams are tasked with protecting an organization’s crown jewels - essential data volumes, intellectual property, financial transactions, or revenue-dependent business operations – from malicious insider or external threats. It’s an evolving and difficult challenge, especially with understaffed SOC teams drowning in false alerts, and ever-increasingly sophisticated attackers using various methods to exploit network vulnerabilities.

With hundreds of new technology trends and literally thousands of vendors vying for attention, its no wonder CSOs and other security professionals struggle to stay fully up to date. The barrage of marketing claims only complicates matters.

So Gartner’s recent research report, “Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar: Security” (paywall) arrives as a balm for the beleaguered security professional, cutting through the noise to provide a snapshot of which new technologies truly offer a leg up on increasingly sophisticated attackers and threats. Among other recommendations in the report, Gartner suggests deception technology offers “easy to deploy, deterministic, and effective threat detection capabilities for enterprises of all sizes,” and here at Illusive Networks we couldn’t agree more.

Shadowy attackers targeting organizations from halfway around the world grab most of the cybersecurity headlines. However, research shows that 60 percent of data breaches and other cyberattacks on organizations are actually carried out by rogue or negligent insiders. According to a recent study by the Ponemon Institute, it takes an average of 72 days to contain an insider threat, and typical organizations with over 1,000 employees spend an average of US$8.76 million cleaning up after insider incidents every year.

For a cyberattacker, every organization is a potential target. Attack frequency and degrees of severity vary with the attacker's skill level, the assets they want, choice of tactics, and the sophistication of their targets' defenses. With attacks constantly in the headlines, it's no wonder security teams might feel overwhelmed. But in reality, not all threats are equal. Not all threats are relevant to all organizations. And not all threats are known.

One week after Equifax announced the settlement terms of its recent breach, two new breaches are making headlines. First, various outlets reported this week that Capital One, among the top 10 banks by asset size in the US, was victimized by a hacker that gained access to more than 100 million customer accounts and credit card applications in early 2019. The hack is one of the largest data breaches to ever hit a financial services firm. What got compromised? The stolen data includes 140,000 Social Security numbers, 1 million Canadian Social Insurance numbers, 80,000 bank account numbers and an undisclosed number of names, addresses, credit scores, credit limits, balances and other personally identifiable information.

“Deception systems can service many different buyer types and needs, from simply being the only detection system a smaller company owns, to augmenting a more robust detection practice at more mature firms, to highly targeted vertical specialization needs, such as IoT and medical devices.”