US companies spending a fortune on false alarms

A report detailing information on the containment of malware claims that US companies are spending $1.3bn (£860m) per year handling false positive information security alerts, equating to almost 21,000 man hours.

Damballa commissioned the  research from the Ponemon Institute, wanting to learn how firms react to malware-based attacks. It discovered that some companies often replied with impromptu incident plans, while others often wasted time and money on investigations of positive information security incidents that later proved to be false.

Damballa CTO Brian Foster said in a company statement that the revelations confirm how big a challenge IT security departments have in finding the genuine threats out of literally thousands of alerts. It also shed light on the financial impact made by the time factor.

Foster commented:

“The severity and frequency of attacks is growing, which means that teams need a way to focus on responding to true positive infections if they are to get a firmer grip on their security posture.”

Foster went on to say how important it is for a security department to contain the intelligence necessary to spot infections, in order to decrease the firm’s exposure to risk and get the most of limited information security resources.

These firms need to fill cyber security jobs to expand their security teams and let them get on with handling any alerts, so that the rest of the workforce can carry out their own tasks uninterrupted. This latest report should serve as a warning of just how important this is.