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Report: M&E taking longer to recover from cyber attacks

November 21, 2024

Fastly, a specialist in global edge cloud platforms, has launched its latest annual Global Security Research Report, revealing a rise in the time it takes businesses in the media and entertainment industries to recover from cyber incidents. In 2024, businesses reported taking an average of 7.8 months to recover from cybersecurity breaches – 28 per cent longer than expected and almost two months past the anticipated timeline of 6.1 months.

With attacks becoming more prevalent and taking longer to recover from, not surprisingly, the report found that 91 per cent of businesses in media and entertainment do plan to increase investment in security tools over the next 12 months, a 20 per cent year-on-year rise. However, despite the additional spending, over half of the surveyed cybersecurity decision makers (57 per cent) feel that an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape has still left them unprepared to deal with future attacks.

Marshall Erwin, CISO at Fastly, commented: “Full recovery from breaches is not getting any faster. The revenue, reputation and time lost damages business relationships permanently and drains resources from other areas of the business. With attacks not diminishing and the possibility of further high-profile slip-ups always present, it’s crucial that any changes businesses are now making to cybersecurity strategies fit within a holistic plan and aren’t knee-jerk reactions.”

Recent global IT outages have also been a wake up call for security professionals with many now scrutinising their vendor choices and the value of cybersecurity investments more closely. In 2024, 40 per cent of media and entertainment businesses expressed concerns about the reliability and software quality across their security stack and nearly one third (29 per cent) considered changing vendors. In addition, the vast majority of businesses (86 per cent) have changed their approach to testing and rolling out updates in response to major reliability incidents.

When it comes to software security, Fastly found that organisations are also re-evaluating how security integrates across their operations. Increasingly, key stakeholders outside traditional security teams, including Platform Engineering teams, are having a say in which app security solutions are being adopted, with nearly one in four (23 per cent) saying one of their organisation’s top priorities was to adopt a platform engineering approach to software security. This is also reflected in a change in culpability, with Platform Engineering teams held responsible for 6 per cent of cybersecurity incidents, only slightly down from CISOs at 11 per cent and CIOs at 8 per cent.

Erwin added: “Cybersecurity spending is under the microscope as businesses continue to feel unprepared dealing with an evolving threat landscape. We are seeing a shift towards a shared responsibility for security across organisations, with increased focus on embedding security measures throughout all projects. Companies that bake in security and establish strong partnerships with security organisations early in a product development process are in a better position to deal with emerging threats and recover more quickly from attacks.”

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