Organizations are increasingly bombarded with malware reports and that can lead to wasted time dealing with false alarms or minor issues.
A new report from The Ponemon Institute, commissioned by breach defense specialist
Damballa, reveals that two-thirds of the time spent by security staff responding to malware alerts is wasted because of faulty intelligence.
The survey of 551 IT and IT security practitioners across EMEA (Europe, Middle east and Africa) finds that teams spend, on average, 272 hours each week responding to 'false positive' cyber alerts -- due to erroneous or inaccurate malware information. This equates to an average cost of £515,964 (around $800,000) annually, for each organization, in lost time.
The findings show that organizations are dealing with nearly 10,000 malware alerts per week, however, only 22 percent of these are considered reliable. More worryingly, only a small fraction -- 3.5 percent -- of all alerts are deemed to be worthy of further investigation. IT teams could therefore be struggling with the resources, or expertise, to block or detect serious malware.
