Breach Reporting Requirements Are Top Concern For Security Teams

Cybersecurity leaders are buckling up for rising costs, a challenging talent shortage, and uncertain data breach reporting requirements going into 2023, according to a Deepwatch Q4 2022 SecOps Pulse survey of cybersecurity teams across various industries, including healthcare.

Cybersecurity professionals expect security investments to rise within the next year in order to keep up with the general rise in targeted attacks.

The majority of respondents indicated digital transformation initiatives, regulatory requirements, and responses to cyber incidents as the top three drivers of cybersecurity cost.

“Breach reporting laws are changing all over the world. The U.S. has several ways in which organizations must announce breaches – whether it’s to CISA, the FTC for publicly traded companies, or HIPAA in healthcare,” said Bill Bernard, AVP security strategy at Deepwatch, said in the press release.

“We’re going to see more activity on this, and it will be complex and complicated for security teams who need to adhere to new and changing regulations.”

Even though the United States does not have a federal data privacy policy in place, discussions around privacy and incident reporting have increased in the last year, especially within the healthcare sector.

In June 2022, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) called on HHS to improve the healthcare data breach reporting process.

Additionally, in response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, US senators have recently urged HHS to update its HIPAA Privacy Rule to address patient privacy concerns.

“Regulatory developments around both incident reporting and privacy will undoubtedly continue to ramp up in 2023,” Bernard stated. “Between differing perspectives on reporting timelines and the multiple agencies and authorities involved, breach notification compliance will be complex and challenging for security teams.

“On the privacy side, security professionals who typically don’t consider themselves privacy professionals will need to play a role in enforcing various controls stemming from multiple privacy requirements emerging across numerous states, countries and governments,” Bernard continued.

The finding showed that nearly 78 percent of surveyed security professionals expect reporting and privacy requirements to increase workload. However, due to current cybersecurity hiring challenges, the increased workload demand might exacerbate the burden for current cybersecurity teams, with 55 percent stating they need more resources to meet additional requirements.

Previous research has shown that demand for cybersecurity workers is expanding and outpacing talent availability. 

According to the Deepwatch survey, cybersecurity staffing is challenging for 95 percent of organizations needing cybersecurity. Security architects, engineers, and threat intel experts.

“As of July 2022, there were 700,000 unfilled cybersecurity positions in the U.S. alone. Few industries face the same worker and skills shortages as cybersecurity,” Deepwatch reporters stated. “Security architects, engineers and threat intel experts are among the most highly sought and highly paid positions. With no national initiative to train cybersecurity professionals, the gap is expected to grow to one million by 2025.”

These staffing challenges have led 82 percent of security professionals to obtain or consider managed services.

“Many organizations still struggle to mature security programs beyond the hardening strategies with strong detection and response capabilities,” added Bernard.

“While we all want to do our best to minimize the attack surface as much as possible, we know the attack surface cannot be totally eliminated. In today’s landscape, every enterprise should be monitoring environments 24/7/365. Running a security operations center internally is a huge undertaking, and many are not only alleviating that workload through managed detection and response (MDR) partners, but they are also getting increased efficacy from MDR specialists that are built to give the highest fidelity alerts and rapid response actions to contain threats swiftly.”