Cybersecurity provider says most agencies have already been attacked

By Emily Jarvis
Internet Editor
FederalNewsRadio

A new survey gauging the vulnerability of companies to cyberattack shows that most believe some sort of attack is inevitable.

Cybersecurity provider Solera Networks has recently completed a network forensics survey that looks at what a lot of companies have done, and are in the process of doing, to head off cyberattacks.

Here is a breakdown of the numbers: -More than 85 percent have had a major network incident in the past 36 months or expect to have one in the coming 36 months -Nearly half say that when an attack occurs, it can take 2 to 10 or more days to determine the full scope of the incident -92 percent believe that it is important to have network forensics capabilities that can capture and record all network traffic, however, only 28 percent were very familiar with network forensic solutions -24 percent don't have an effective incident response plan in place

For a full link to the Solera Networks study click here.

Solera hopes that its programs will help to prepare networks for a cyber attack and greatly improve the response.

"We do for our network what a camera does for a bank," said Solera Networks President and CEO Steve Shillingford. Shillingford spoke with Amy Morris and Chris Dorobek on the Daily Debrief.

'It's all about risk mitigation, we think that there has been an over allocation of prevention and remediation," said Shillingford.

Solera's fix, "We essentially provide a solution that allows you to collect over some period of time of all the traffic that crosses in and out of your network. Then give you various ways to identify the needle in the hay stack after an event has happened so you can reduce the overall exposure. This can take an incident investigation from days or weeks down to hours," said Shillingford.

Shillingford says that almost every network will be attacked in some way so now we need to focus on how systems are being attacked and then we can take measure to protect the system long term.

He says this process is not easy in the public sector and becomes an uphill climb in federal agencies do to the various complexities associated with them.

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