In preparation for Black Hat USA next week in Las Vegas, I reviewed the results from the new 2019 Black Hat Attendee Survey. The survey takes the pulse of 345 security professionals who have attended or plan to attend Black Hat USA. These four findings stood out because ThreatQuotient is uniquely positioned to help security professionals address each of these concerns. 

1. Incident response. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of the respondents believe they will have to respond to a major security breach in their own organization in the coming year, up from 59% in 2018. Most do not believe they have the staffing or budget to defend adequately against current and emerging threats. The ThreatQ platform serves as a central repository to store, share and update key learnings across teams, while ThreatQ Investigations provides a shared environment to work collaboratively to accelerate investigations and coordinate response. With the ability to use existing resources more effectively, teams can take the right actions faster to improve remediation quality, coverage and speed.
2. Targeted attacks and spear phishing. Since 2015, the two most cited threats and concerns remain sophisticated attacks targeted directly at the organization (46%) and phishing/social engineering (43%). To address targeted attacks, ThreatQ and ThreatQ Investigations empower teams to proactively hunt for threats – iteratively searching for malicious activity that has not yet been identified by the sensor grid as well as potential hopping points an attacker might leverage in the future. When it comes to spear phishing, ThreatQ simplifies the process of parsing and analyzing these emails to better understand the methods used by attackers and improve prevention and response. 
3. Critical infrastructure vulnerabilities. More than three-quarters (77%) believe that a successful cyberattack on US critical infrastructure will occur in the next two years, up from 69% in 2018; only 21% believe that government and private industry are prepared to respond. The ThreatQ platform and ThreatQ Investigations gives critical infrastructure providers the context and confidence needed to make better decisions, accelerate detection and response, and advance team collaboration and learning for continuous improvement. There’s no need to alter security infrastructure or workflows; all tool technologies work seamlessly with ThreatQ’s open architecture.
4. Burn out. Four in 10 security professionals consider themselves “burned out.” Security analysts struggle to make sense of too much data which is a huge cause of fatigue and burnout. ThreatQ provides the ability to turn threat data into threat intelligence through context and automatically prioritize based on user-defined scoring and relevance. Serving as a threat intelligence platform, it simplifies threat intelligence management. ThreatQ also brings efficiency and accuracy to alert triage and vulnerability management, in both use cases allowing analysts to focus resources where the risk is greatest and integrate with existing security tools, teams and workflows through standard interfaces to take action quickly. 

The good news about the results from the Black Hat Attendee Survey is that they are addressable. If you’re planning to attend Black Hat USA next week, we’d love to show you how ThreatQ and ThreatQ Investigations can help.  Schedule a 1-on-1 meeting with our team at Black Hat USA. Can’t make it to Black Hat? Request a live demo.