October marked a dubious milestone for cybersecurity. A report from the Identity Theft Research Center confirmed that the number of cyber attacks reported through the first nine months of the year exceeded the total recorded for the entirety of 2020. And not by a small margin either—attacks are up 17% in 2021 compared to last year. Clearly, hackers have been busy, as have the cybersecurity experts tasked with mitigating the damage.

This week marks our mid-year kick-off. It’s our all-company meeting that, like Arctic Wolf, gets bigger each year with hundreds of new team members joining us from around the world—many for the first time. With so much new hiring (we’re on pace to nearly double ourselves, again), I’m continually reminded of our Wolf Pack’s talent, dedication, and drive for success, and I’m proud to work alongside these professionals daily.

We believe, a Market Guide defines a market and explains what clients can expect it to do in the short term. With the focus on early, more chaotic markets, a Market Guide does not rate or position vendors within the market, but rather more commonly outlines attributes of representative vendors that are providing offerings in the market to give further insight into the market itself. We feel the Gartner Market Guide helps organizations learn about the below.

Extended detection and response (XDR) has transpired into a market description that, in my not so humble opinion, proves to be as troublesome as the phrases “next gen” or “machine learning” were from 2016 to 2020. I’ll quote myself from a popular blog post from my time at Gartner: Naming aside, the one thing that all InfoSec commentators agree on is that XDR is an evolution of the endpoint-centric approach pioneered by legacy security vendors.

It seems that we might be getting to the tipping point in the corporate world where most organizations and businesses recognize they’re exposed to an increasing amount of cybersecurity risk. And with bad guys devoting a large portion of their strategy to targeting employees, the need for effectively training employees is intensifying. But before you begin to evaluate or build a program you need to first define and cement what it is you are looking to accomplish with your program.

This August we commissioned a survey of over 1,400 senior IT decision-makers and business executives in the US, UK, and Canada. Our initial publication of the findings dug deep into their thoughts and attitudes on many issues, including nation-state attacks and hybrid work. In addition, however, our survey featured several questions on cyber insurance. So in this article, we’ll provide the cyber insurance insights shared by the survey respondents.

COVID-19 provided the public and private sectors with a crash course in remote work. Regardless of their approach to remote or distributed work before the pandemic, organizations, including governments and schools, had to stand up a fully remote workforce in a matter of days. Those tasked with making the switch found themselves forced to face and tackle new and unfamiliar obstacles. They also learned what it takes to shift work processes to a hybrid or fully remote environment.

For many cybersecurity professionals, October’s annual "cybersecurity awareness month" is met with scorn and ire, or mocked on social media for likes and hearts. Meanwhile they forget that, outside the small percentage of humanity that exist in our cybersecurity bubble, there are an enormous number of people that can and do benefit from the additional outreach, engagement, and focus that Cybersecurity Awareness Month brings.

September confirmed some things we already knew about the current state of cybercrime: While undersecured corporate targets remain tempting targets for hackers, the situation is increasingly worse for data-rich organizations such as governments, schools, and healthcare facilities. All of those sectors had cause for concern as the month drew to a close.