Splunk sits at the heart of Security Operations for many of the world’s largest and most complex organizations. We spend our days helping CISOs and their teams get ahead of emerging threats, respond quickly when incidents inevitably occur, and succeed as business enablers. In The CISO Report, we share the results of our original research and offer insights on how leaders can evolve along with the cybersecurity landscape.

Organizations are developing new applications as part of an overall movement toward digitally transforming business operations. Many executives and board members still consider these purely technology problems, but this perception is greatly mistaken. Given the potential business impact, they should accept these as business issues. Ensuring system security and resilience must be addressed as part of business planning, risk management, and operations.

In this, our seventh annual survey, we added many questions but didn’t really take any away. Our new areas of focus include operational threat hunting, threat intelligence, data ingestion into the SIEM, and SOAR, as well as more detailed questions relevant to staff hiring and retention.

In the two years since our inaugural State of Observability report, we’ve seen the number of organizations getting started with observability rise substantially, and a whopping 87% of respondents now employ specialists who work exclusively on observability projects. There are plenty of good reasons so many businesses are jumping on the observability bandwagon. We surveyed 1,750 observability practitioners, managers and experts to examine that state of observability - from the success of today to the ambitions of tomorrow.

Within this context, we surveyed over 2,000 cybersecurity decision-makers in 22 countries, working in enterprises with over 500 employees, to understand the current state of business enablement. More precisely, we wanted to identify, with data, the kinds of attributes that have a meaningful impact on business enablement, including alignment, skills, and organizational structures. In this report, you’ll get a picture of the current situation and understand some of the drivers that determine not just cybersecurity posture but also business success.

For the last eight years, we’ve produced the State of DevOps report, hearing from over 33,000 professionals worldwide. We’ve outlined the DevOps practices that drive successful software delivery and operational performance, with a deep focus on security for the 2022 report.

Our annual survey is an opportunity to see where teams are succeeding with DevSecOps and where they might be struggling. Second, by capturing trends and movement in this market, we hope to give software development teams — from individual contributors to executives — insight into how to get the most out of their DevSecOps investments. This year’s survey respondents offered their views against the backdrop of a growing set of macroeconomic influences.

With a steady increase in cyberattacks each year and a constantly evolving threat landscape, more organizations are turning their attention to building long-term cyber resilience: the ability of the workforce to adapt, respond, and recover from cybersecurity incidents, not merely the ability to detect and prevent them. To learn more about the state of cyber resilience, we surveyed senior security and risk leaders and found that cyber resilience indeed tops their list of strategic and spending priorities for organizations in 2023, driven largely by concerns about ransomware, supply chain and third-party attacks, and coding vulnerabilities.

Executives clearly recognize the danger. Almost three-quarters (74%) of 168 executives recently surveyed by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services regard cyber risk as one of the top-three risks their company faces today, and 67% predict it will be a top three risk two years for now. Only half of respondents, however, say they are successful or very successful at generating insights and enabling informed decisions on cyber risk and at anticipating, preparing for, and responding to future cyber incidents.

Cyberattacks continue to grow in quantity and sophistication at the same time that organizations’ systems become increasingly complex. Security teams, as always, feel the stress. But a surprising outcome of our 2023 State of Security research is that the number of respondents who say they just can’t keep up has shrunk. Whether this data represents incremental improvement or a onetime windfall, organizations should press any advantage. Which won’t be easy: Most security teams tell us they’re too stuck in reactive mode to be effectively proactive.

In this risk surface series, RiskRecon, a Mastercard Company, and Cyentia have worked to help third-party risk managers understand how to measure and manage risk. We’ve seen variation across industries and other slices. But not all firms are interchangeable. A payroll processor cannot be replaced with a janitorial supply company, at least not with good business outcomes! In this report, we look at what distinguishes top-performing firms from those that struggle the most. Armed with this knowledge, Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) professionals can take into account the totality of their risk surface, and how it impacts the overall security performance of an organization

The data in this study is derived from the Cisco Security Outcomes survey in which respondents were anonymous to the researchers and not informed who was conducting the study. Using the same methodology as prior years, more than 4700 security professionals from 26 geographies completed the survey in Summer 2022. Survey respondents represent major industries and a mix of company sizes.

This white paper breaks down existing methods of preventative cyber security and deep dives into Darktrace PREVENT: a product family that combines many of the best aspects of existing methods in an end-to-end, AI-powered solution.

For our seventh annual survey, Venminder surveyed individuals from a wide variety of organizations and industries, including financial services, fintech, retail, food services, insurance, healthcare, information technology, and more in a nice balance of different sizes ranging from less than $1B assets of less than 100 employees to more than $10B assets or more than 5,000 employees.

In this report, sponsored by F5 Labs, we take a step back and examine the universe of vulnerabilities (defined by the CVE) and how it’s changed in the last 20 years. As you will see, we will find some surprising things along the way.

This report explores four key trends in teh payments space, and their importance to issuers, merchants and fintechs in reducing losses from fraud and unnecessary chargebacks while also delivering a next-gen customer experience.

This report is based on data gathered from billions of containers, thousands of cloud accounts, and hundreds of thousands of applications that our customers operated over the course of the last year. Our findings provide signs of hope for overburdened developers, as the data showed opportunities to focus remediation efforts on vulnerable packages loaded at runtime.

The past year, the VOID grew from 2,000 to nearly 10,000 incident reports from close to 600 organizations. We rigorously collect the same metadata, along with a new value: severity. This enabled us to investigate whether there is a relationship between the reported length of the incident and the impact (or severity) of the incident.

In their inaugural report, the Station 9 research team explores the complexities of open source dependencies and the top security considerations for open source adoption at the enterprise.

The SANS 2022 Security Awareness Report analyzes data provided by more than a thousand security awareness professionals from around the world to identify and benchmark how organizations are managing their human risk. The goal of this data-driven report is to provide actionable steps and resources to enable organizations to mature their awareness programs and benchmark them against others.

The study revealed that every fourth organization believes they are at greater cybersecurity risk now than before the pandemic. The most common incidents reported since transition to remote work were dependent on the human factor and included phishing, admin mistakes and improper data sharing by employees.