by DH Kass • Jul 18, 2020

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has forced corporate security teams to cut staff and freeze hiring as the cyber risks and the financial peril of the crisis take hold, a new study said.

Since the onset of the pandemic, three in four companies experienced security team furloughs and 68 percent laid off team members, Exabeam, a security information and event management (SIEM) specialist, said in its 2020 State of the SOC report. To put the data in perspective, in the first half of 2020, 80 percent of organizations experienced an uptick in cyber attack attempts and one in three were victimized by a successful hacker infiltration, the Foster City, California-based company said.

To compile its report, Exabeam gathered data from 1,000 IT security professionals at small- to medium-sized enterprises, half of which held chief information security officer (CISO) or security operations center (SOC) roles. Half of the respondents were security engineer/analysts or security architects. The study spanned organizations in the U.S. and U.K.

Key findings include:

• Cyber risk. 80 percent of companies overall experienced an increased number of cyber attack…

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