Confronting Cyberthreats: The need for advanced data visualization tools by threat response teams

As our world gets more competitive, and organizations rely primarily on interconnected ecosystems, the threats to those environments, from “bad actors”, grow exponentially. The rush to digitize critical processes and infrastructure, a pivot to implement the Internet of Things (IoT), and a paradigm shift to remote work and collaboration, has taken its toll on the protection of those key components of industry. Today, due to a lack of data visualization tools, cyber assets remain more vulnerable than ever, posing an existential threat to many organizations.

Cybersecurity Gets a Higher Profile

Corporations have largely reacted to the cyber threats and challenges they face, because they’re ill-equipped to manage those threats. They deal with each incident, or potential risk situation, in isolation and, once resolved, incident response (IR) teams move to the next set of challenges over the horizon. Clearly, this approach to cybersecurity isn’t working. It’s no wonder then, that in PwC’s 25th Annual Global CEO Survey[i], industry leaders ranked cyber risks as the top threat to corporate growth.

Without the use of advanced data visualization software, managing and securing our digital environment has become cumbersome and complex. A patch-work of tools, processes and systems leaves cyber security leaders and forensics professionals using disjoint and disparate tools and technologies to fend against growing cyberthreats. And that’s a view shared by nearly 75% of corporate leaders who participated in PwC’s 2022 Global Digital Trust Insights Survey. The overwhelming conclusion is that “…too much avoidable, unnecessary organizational complexity poses “concerning” cyber and privacy risks.”

And Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) aren’t taking the need for cybersecurity lightly either. The PwC survey indicated that 69% of organizations surveyed (versus to 55% last year) were committed to increasing their cybersecurity spend in 2022. And of that population, 26% (versus just 8%) intend to increase their cybersecurity budgets by 10% or more. That puts the acknowledgement for cybersecurity higher-up on everyone’s radars, and is a resounding endorsement of the need to use leading edge data visualization tools as part of a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy.

Big Payoffs from Cybersecurity

So, what’s at stake for organizations worldwide, from ignoring the cyber threat? One analyst expects the global cost of cybercrime to surpass 10.5-trillion USD by 2025[iii]. To put that number in perspective, as the analyst points out, measured in terms of national GDP, the cost of cybercrime equates to the third-largest economy in the world!

There are hard dollar costs that organizations can avoid by giving cybersecurity the attention it deserves. In 2021, the cost of data breaches rose from 3.86-million USD to 4.24-million USD[iv] – a nearly 10% increase.  Compromised credentials, which is the most common initial attack vector, cost an average of 4.37-million USD. And as corporations moved their digital activity to the cloud, their average cost of breach from malicious cyber activity grew to $5.12-million USD[v].  That potential cost avoidance is a payoff from improving cybersecurity across organizations.

The Solution: An Integrated Cybersecurity Approach

There’s only one way to tackle the cybersecurity challenges, and prevail! And that’s to triage, investigate, respond to, and manage security events, across teams, incidents, and time zones, using an integrated set of cybersecurity data visualization tools. QuoLab Technologies’ data visualization software offers IR teams a collaborative platform, using industry-reputed Threat Intelligence (TI) data feeds, to create actionable intelligence about threat actors, attacks, and incidents. IR teams can cut down data and malware processing time by half, and can respond to internal and external threats 480% faster!