A whopping 93 per cent of organisations are finding the execution of some essential security operations difficult exposing companies to cyber threats, a new report has revealed.

Among these challenges, 75 per cent struggle with identifying the root causes behind an incident, leaving them vulnerable to further Malicious Activity.

The report, The State of Cybersecurity 2023: The Business Impact of Adversaries on Defenders says that 52 per cent of organizations surveyed pointed out that cyber threats are now too advanced for their organization to deal with on their own.

"Today's threats require a timely and coordinated response. Unfortunately, too many organizations are stuck in reactive mode. Not only is this having an impact on core business priorities, but it also has a sizeable human toll,” said Sophos field Chief Technology Officer John Shier.

While 94 percent said they are working with external specialists to scale their operations, the majority still remain involved with managing threats rather than taking a fully outsourced approach

From the report it emerged that the inability to understand how an attack happened, has left firms unable to make proper remediation, leaving organizations vulnerable to repetitive and multiple attacks, by the same or different adversaries.

An estimated 71 per cent of those surveyed reported challenges with timely remediation as they didn’t understand which signals/alerts to investigate.

“Eliminating the guesswork and applying defensive controls based on actionable intelligence will let IT teams focus on enabling the business instead of trying to douse the eternal flame of active attacks,” added Shier.

Despite the dangers of cybercrime 71 per cent also cited challenges in prioritizing investigations.

The report is recommending that if organisations can have external audits and monitoring it will help eliminate blind spots that may not be visible to the organisations internal IT teams.