Data is a necessary evil when it comes to our new world that’s run by technology. It’s both an opportunity as well as a risk for most businesses. Anyone who has anything to do with cybersecurity knows about big data.
There is technology that allows us to mine enormous data sets and analyze them to find patterns and behavioral trends. Big data is collected from a wide variety of sources in many different formats and is both structured and unstructured.
Discovering insights from this seemingly meaningless data can be a difficult job, but the ROI from doing so makes all the effort worthwhile.
Cybersecurity is one of the many applications of clean and voluminous data. Before digging deeper into how data can straighten a business’ cybersecurity posture, let’s look at a few mistakes some organizations might make in saving their data and infrastructure.
Why do some businesses fail in their
data-driven cybersecurity strategy?
According to Accenture (study conducted by the Ponemon Institute), there are more than 68% of business leaders that feel that their security risks are increasing. Yet several businesses are now aware of how big data can enhance their efforts to protect digital systems and infrastructures.
Then why do we only see a few success stories in data-driven cybersecurity?
Here are the top three reasons why organizations never start using big data for their cybersecurity efforts and fail halfway even if they do.
- Saving Information – Meeting the challenge of saving information might seem simple, but considering the scale of data we’re talking about, it’s easy to understand why most companies struggle with this. The volume of data that needs to be analyzed for it to reveal useful trends that aid in threat detection and mitigation is daunting and overwhelming. Traditionally, security tools and technologies that were employed to mine data were more reactive than proactive. They also led to a large number of false positives, creating distractions and inefficiencies. Moreover, they lacked the capability to deal with large volumes of streaming, real-time, and historical data.
- Data Rights and Ownership – With many stringent laws around data ownership and rights, companies are now more fearful of collecting and storing large amounts of sensitive information that might belong to their partner networks and customers. However, if an organization wants to protect itself through a holistic cybersecurity approach, it’s essential that they take third parties into consideration. Organizations have failed in using data to any significant effect, being wary of the many protocols and policies they need to jump through.
- Resource Availability and Accessibility – Organizations need access to the right specialists if they want to drive their cybersecurity operations with data. Data scientists are not always a part of every organization, which poses a challenge and reminds decision-makers that they are, in fact, starting from scratch. Besides talent, companies also need access to the right software with advanced machine learning and analysis capabilities to ensure that the available data is being used to its potential. Such cutting-edge cybersecurity systems are rare even today when data has been accepted as the new oil.
When cybercriminals attack organizations with big data sets, the reward is worth all the effort to penetrate security layers. Cyber attackers have a lot more to gain when they target such organizations, making the latter a lucrative target. Therefore, data is as much of an opportunity for cybersecurity as it is a risk.
“When cybercriminals target organizations with large volumes of data, the reward they reap is well worth the effort to penetrate various layers of security.”
A fail-proof approach to cybersecurity with data
Cybersecurity will make or break the foundation of any information technology initiative in your enterprise. It is undeniably critical today for every business that exists online and houses data. In order to support the IT infrastructure of tomorrow, cyberdefensive systems will need to become more sophisticated.
Businesses now need to interconnect all defense systems and bring them all together to build a holistic cybersecurity posture and identify and respond to threats in real-time.
Artificial intelligence will also play a key role in making this happen. As we get to automating and reducing manual errors, AI and ML will help build a more resilient organization. Overall, we will have cybersecurity systems that are smarter and able to handle large populations of systems and data.
Previously, risk assessments, vulnerability identification, and correlation rules were used as security methods, which led to shortcomings such as false positives, the inability to handle unique incidents, and slower event responses.
However, the data-driven cybersecurity solutions of today are composed of:
- Intrusion Detection – This includes monitoring all the traffic that passes through an organizational network that helps detect and identify malicious activity using big data. TEHTRIS NTA can easily support your organization at handling this job, or if you already have a NIDS/NTA solution, it can be plugged into TEHTRIS SIEM to leverage the related data.
- Incident Response – This type of approach can handle many kinds of security incidents, including attacks and breaches. Incident response does this by focusing on the detection, identification, isolation, and elimination of the root causes of incidents. TEHTRIS EDR is surely our flagship product regarding incident response, as well as our integrated SOAR inside the TEHTRIS XDR Platform, so that we can apply sharp technical playbooks.
- Predictive Analysis – Data scientists can predict risks to an organization based on previous and current data patterns. They juxtapose historical data with current data and identify the cybersecurity risks attached to its particular characteristics, so it becomes easy to detect anomalies. TEHTRIS SIEM is quite useful, and its power becomes even stronger through our security dashboards included in the TEHTRIS XDR Platform. With a unified console and threat hunting analysis, our partners and customers can easily track down potential security issues.
The sophisticated systems of today and tomorrow work to predict and prevent cybersecurity incidents in a proactive way instead of taking the reactive approach after an event has already taken place.
Why is data your best investment
in strengthening your security posture?
Using big data for cybersecurity is a double-edged sword. In the right hands, with the right strategy, data can support your organization’s security needs and protect your infrastructure from criminals who are only waiting for the right moment to attack you.
Data can be your best investment in improving cybersecurity as it eliminates guesswork and allows for factual decision making. Data-driven cybersecurity will also be able to reduce incident response time, which may minimize damage. According to some cybersecurity companies in 2019, the average time to identify a breach was between 150 and 200 days!
And finally, data-led cybersecurity can empower you to offer distinguished services and products to your customers and personalize them without worrying about the consequences.
Our team of cybersecurity specialists at TEHTRIS is fully aware of this, so we decided to take data-driven cybersecurity to a global scale. By assessing data from carefully stationed Honeypots all over the world, we plan on helping the cybersecurity community witness first-hand the attackers’ methods for launching attacks and how they gain access to networks.
In addition, our detection and response system, TEHTRIS XDR Platform, is AI and ML-enabled and uses a data-driven approach to make holistic cybersecurity a possibility for your business.
Learn more about us at tehtris.com.