The cybersecurity landscape is accelerating in complexity and scale. While cybersecurity spending has grown at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of approximately 10% over the past decade, the CAGR for breaches has surged to an alarming 34%, and the lines are diverging. This highlights three severe problems:
- The security industry, as we know it, is broken.
- You can’t spend your way out of the problem.
- Spending more money gives organizations a false sense of security.
This disparity underscores the need for a paradigm shift in our approach to security and enables the CAGR lines to converge. Integrity controls offer a solution to the most persistent challenges in today’s cyber ecosystem. Let me explain and highlight how they can address six of the most pressing and key security problems.
Challenge 1: Incident Detection and Containment Takes Too Long
According to IBM’s Ponemon Report, the seven-year average for detecting and containing a breach is 274 days (273 days for 2023). Such delays give attackers ample time for preparation, modifications, exfiltration, and escalation of their foothold.
How Integrity Controls Help: By focusing on integrity verification, organizations can immediately detect unauthorized changes, drastically reducing both Mean-Time-to-Identify (MTTI) and Mean-Time-to-Contain (MTTC) to mere seconds and minutes. Integrity controls complement existing tools by offering precise, actionable alerts, ensuring that deviations are detected and contained faster.
Challenge 2: Rising Breach Rates vs. Stagnant Security ROI
Cybersecurity investments are growing, but breaches are increasing at an alarmingly fast rate. Traditional controls—Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPP), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Extended Detection and Response (XDR), and Vulnerability Management (VM)—are reactive and fail to address the “root cause” of security incidents: unauthorized or unexpected changes. It’s the symptom vs problem argument.
When an event or incident occurs by any one of the above categories of tools, there are structured plans to respond to that span from weeks to months in duration:
- Incident Response Plan (IRP)
- Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)
- Business Continuity Plan (BCP)
Expense is primarily associated with event notification followed by response, remediation, and recovery of operations. It's like driving a car with airbags but no brakes.
Airbags (MTTC – Respond and Recover)
- Designed to minimize death
- Car is typically totaled
- Requires long shop time to fix
Whereas
Brakes (MTTI – Detect)
- Avoids catastrophic accidents
- Small percentage of overall yearly maintenance
- Easy to replace and fix
How Integrity Controls Help: Integrity controls continuously monitor critical systems for unauthorized modifications. By validating the integrity of files, settings, configurations, and software, these controls can detect real-time deviations that other tools missed. This proactive approach reduces the attack surface and the likelihood of undetected exploits escalating into breaches.
Challenge 3: Cloud Environments Extend Detection Times
Detection of breaches in cloud environments takes, on average, 29 days longer than on-premises. The dynamic and distributed nature of cloud infrastructure exacerbates monitoring challenges, and it is often assumed that integrity controls are inherently built into the cloud environment when, in fact, they are not.
How Integrity Controls Help: Integrity controls offer a lightweight, scalable way to monitor cloud environments. They establish baselines of "known good" configurations and detect deviations regardless of the complexity or scale of the cloud ecosystem. This ensures that cloud environments receive the same level of proactive protection as on-premises systems.
Challenge 4: High-Profile Breaches Despite Established Controls
Upon evaluation and investigation of the last 100 most significant breaches in federal and commercial organizations, ALL of them had EPP, SIEM, XDR, and VM tools in place. With the exorbitant amounts of money allocated by these organizations to minimize the risk of cybersecurity events, they still continue to be breached. These tools rely heavily on signatures, heuristics, or known patterns of bad or malicious activity, which attackers continually evolve to bypass. Yet, the industry continues to lean heavily on these tools and their inability to protect and detect.
How Integrity Controls Help: Unlike denylists, which inherently trust activity unless flagged as malicious, integrity controls operate on an "assume breach" model. By aligning and enforcing zero-trust principles, integrity controls verify all changes against approved and trusted baselines, ensuring that even novel or sophisticated attacks are flagged if they deviate from the expected and trusted state of operation.
Challenge 5: The Denylist Problem
The reliance on denylists assumes that activity is legitimate unless known or proven to be malicious, leaving organizations vulnerable to advanced, zero-day, and insider threats that don’t match known patterns.
How Integrity Controls Help: Integrity controls inherently trust nothing. By continuously validating system states against a trusted baseline and/or an allowlist of approved configurations, they eliminate the blind spots created by denylists. This proactive approach enables faster, more accurate detection of unauthorized activity, regardless of its nature.
Challenge 6: Underutilization of High-Impact Controls
Studies from the IT Process Institute highlight that three specific controls can auto-detect 91% of all security incidents, yet they are not widely implemented or implemented incorrectly. These controls include configuration baselining, change control, and release management. Collectively, by definition, they are called out as basic integrity control capabilities in almost every published IT security framework.
How Integrity Controls Help: Integrity controls are at the heart of these three high-impact strategies. They ensure that all systems and configurations remain in a known-good state and flag deviations immediately. Organizations can dramatically improve their detection capabilities by automating these processes without adding significant operational overhead. When correctly implemented, integrity controls have a substantial downstream effect on the IRP, DRP, and BCP.
Challenge 7: Resiliency and Remediation
Resiliency and remediation remain critical challenges in cybersecurity as organizations struggle to respond to and recover quickly from breaches and ensure ongoing operational continuity. Organizations typically roll back, when necessary, by entirely blowing away the image and reprovisioning the device. This process takes time, energy, effort, and money.
How Integrity Controls Help: Integrity controls and functionality address this challenge by storing all of the files, settings, configurations, and software that correspond to the established trusted baseline. Rollback and remediation action can be accomplished through manual or automated remediation and limit the scope of potential damage. Any added file is removed, and any file removed or modified is replaced with the original.
This proactive approach reduces downtime and enhances overall resilience, allowing organizations to bounce back and recover swiftly from incidents while maintaining trust in their operational environment.
Why Integrity Controls Deserve Focus
Integrity controls address fundamental cybersecurity stack gaps by shifting from reactive to proactive protection. They:
- Enhance visibility across on-prem and cloud environments.
- Reduce detection and containment times.
- Operate independently of attacker techniques, tactics, and procedures (TTPs).
- Enable enterprise-wide resiliency and availability.
- Complement existing security tools for a layered, robust defense.
The cybersecurity landscape demands a strategic “shift left” from reactive to proactive detection. Integrity controls provide an efficient, scalable, and effective solution to persistent problems like delayed detection, reliance on the denylist approach, and the limitations of traditional tools. By prioritizing integrity controls, organizations can close the widening gap between rising cybersecurity spending and the increasing prevalence of breaches—ensuring a more resilient security posture for the future.
