Tripwire (News - Alert) software helps businesses protect their assets by providing them policy management and file integrity monitoring among other types of security. The security company recently attended the Black Hat USA 2015 conference and made use of its audience by polling 215 attendees about their views concerning cyberattacks.

What it found in the survey was that 64 percent of them believed their organizations were potential targets for nation-state cyberattacks. Many also reported an increase in the number of attacks on their organization and a significant lack of confidence in their abilities to defend such attacks. Tim Erlin, the director of IT security and risk strategy at Tripwire, commented that businesses may have a hard time implementing even the most basic defensive security tools.

“Organizations know they are being actively targeted and that their current capabilities aren’t enough to consistently detect and defend against these attacks,” Erlin said. “While new defensive technologies are constantly being developed, organizations are hard pressed to deploy these new tools effectively. In many cases, these organizations would do well to evaluate their investment in foundational security controls. Although these controls are not new, they are the backbone of effective breach detection and response.”

This reality is evident in the disparity between the 86 percent of respondents that have seen an increase in attacks and the 47 percent who reported that their confidence in fending off these attacks has not risen in the past 12 months.

Additional figures that heighten the situation include the 64 percent of respondents who said they have experienced a growth of 20 percent or more in targeted attacks, 53 percent who said they do not have the visibility to track all their network threats, and 41 percent who said they have seen a “significant increase” in the number of successful cyberattacks in the past 12 months.

None of those signs inspire much optimism in the ability of organizations to defend themselves. This could either be a blessing or curse to the existing cybersecurity market which is expected to grow to at least $155 billion by 2019. On one hand, this means that companies are clearly unable to defend attacks on their own. On the other hand, the ability of cybersecurity experts to make businesses safe could also be lacking.

Erlin's comment that companies are hard-pressed to deploy security tools gives the topic an air of difficulty. It could just be too time consuming or complicated for average companies to use basic tools. If that is the situation, they could benefit from cloud-based security that is expected to be the backbone of growing revenue in the overall market. This should make tools easier to utilize and more cost-effective in the long run. In any case, it appears that companies need to figure out something and fast. When an increase in attacks and a lessening of confidence are the norm, it can be difficult to determine if any business's data, and therefore any client data, is actually safe.