Organizations are getting increasingly prioritizing incident response capabilities by putting investigation firms on retainer, or creating their own internal teams, says Patrick Morley, president and CEO of Bit9 + Carbon Black.

Gartner's Claudio Neiva says there is only so much an intrusion detection and prevention system can do, so organizations need to take additional steps to safeguard critical data and systems.

Attackers today continue to refine their distributed denial-of-service attack capabilities, delivering downtime on demand. The increase in attack effectiveness and volume demands new types of defenses, says Akamai's Richard Meeus.

Two years after the leaks that showed the U.S. National Security Agency spied on America's European allies, the U.S. and Europe still need to rebuild trust so they can collaborate on defending against cyber-attacks, says Carsten Casper of Gartner.

Last year, organizations took an average of 205 days to detect a breach. To better combat such attacks and lock down breaches, FireEye's Jason Steer says organizations must lower that to hours or even minutes.

Larry Ponemon, founder of the Ponemon Institute, offers an in-depth analysis of the results of the organization's 10th study of the costs of data breaches, which found, for example, that rapid growth in hacker attacks is leading to escalating costs.

"Show me your dashboard." That's a request security expert Gavin Millard regularly makes to CISOs to demonstrate how today's too-complex dashboards highlight the challenge of gathering and distilling essential security metrics.

Mark Weatherford, a former DHS cybersecurity leader, says the Office of Personnel Management neglected to take basic steps that could have helped prevent a breach that may have exposed the PII of 4 million current and former government workers.

While cyberthreat information sharing within the banking sector has improved, the retail sector has failed to keep up. But ISACA's Robert Stroud said pending federal legislation could help change that.

When it comes to advanced threat protection, security leaders increasingly turn to new machine learning solutions. Stephen Newman of Damballa discusses key skills and strategies necessary for success.