Reaction to New Security Threat Class
This highlights a critical vulnerability window for cybersecurity practitioners facing new threats, though it is incremental in analyzing existing data.
The study measured the reaction time of scientific and professional communities to new security threat classes, finding it takes about a year for scientific publications and over two years for patents to emerge, leading to a 2-3 year gap before effective products are available.
Each new identified security threat class triggers new research and development efforts by the scientific and professional communities. In this study, we investigate the rate at which the scientific and professional communities react to new identified threat classes as it is reflected in the number of patents, scientific articles and professional publications over a long period of time. The following threat classes were studied: Phishing; SQL Injection; BotNet; Distributed Denial of Service; and Advanced Persistent Threat. Our findings suggest that in most cases it takes a year for the scientific community and more than two years for industry to react to a new threat class with patents. Since new products follow patents, it is reasonable to expect that there will be a window of approximately two to three years in which no effective product is available to cope with the new threat class.