Eighty-eight percent of hackers surveyed at the 2016 DEF CON conference in Las Vegas last August claimed that they can compromise a target in less than 12 hours, while 81 percent said they can identify and exfiltrate a target's data in the same amount of time, according to a report from data intelligence company Nuix.
Published yesterday, "The Black Report 2017" seeks to get inside the mind of a hacker in order to present a clearer picture of what solutions cybersecurity practitioners truly need, as opposed to what they think they want. Nuix questioned approximately 70 hackers for the project.
Based on survey responses, the most effective countermeasure against hackers is endpoint security – 36 percent of polled hackers named this as the best defensive tactic – followed by intrusion detection and prevention systems (29 percent) and firewalls (10 percent). However, 22 percent of the hackers claimed that no security countermeasures could stop them.
Other key findings:
- 50 percent of respondents said that they change their attack methodologies with each new target
- 84 percent of hackers confirmed that they social engineer their intended victims
- 42 percent of survey-takers believe that data hygiene and information governance are the least effective use of security budget
- 52 percent of respondents said that employee education was an extremely important countermeasure
