Threat data feeds play a major role in helping organizations tighten up their cybersecurity posture, a new report from Neustar and the Ponemon Institute claims.
Polling more than 1,000 security professionals, the pair found that almost four in five (79 percent) believe data feeds are essential to a strong, secure IT environment. For more than half (55 percent), threat data can help pinpoint cybersecurity threats with greater accuracy.
Threat data feeds offer multiple benefits, from unique data that better informs security practitioners, to increased preventive blocking. They can also reduce the mean time to detect and remediate an attack, as well as reduce the time spent investigating false positives.
However, false positives are still a major pain in the neck for security professionals. More than half (56 percent) of respondents also said threat feeds often deliver too much, overly complex data, hindering their ability to act in a timely fashion.
Over the past two years, the organizations polled suffered 28 attacks on average. In two out of every five cases, security teams couldn’t stop the attack because their data feeds did not provide them with timely, actionable data.
