Only 12 percent of European companies worried about security breaches

The survey of 400 companies with more than 1,000 employees in the UK, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands revealed that 80% rely on traditional approaches to security.

The survey shows that only 12% of respondents regard insider threats as being of high concern. More are concerned about viruses (67%), advanced persistent threats (APTs) (42%), phishing (28%) and poor user security practices (27%).

Respondents listed the top three obstacles to investigating threats from within the organisation as not knowing what to look for (40%), a lack of education and training (39%) and not understanding what normal looks like across different departments (36%).

While nearly all respondents recognise the need to use firewalls (98%) and anti-virus (96%), very few see the need to back them up with security analytics (15%) or user behaviour analytics and anomaly detection (12%) to detect breaches after they have happened.

Less than half of respondents have either a dedicated incident response team (41%) or a security operations centre (34%) in place.

Duncan Brown, research director at IDC’s European security practice, said the majority of organisations have experienced a data breach over the past two years, but the average time to discover a breach remains around eight months. According to Brown, organisations should take an analytics-driven approach to detect threats early and respond effectively.