Rapid consumerisation of IT has increasing hacking
View(s):Many facets of the threat landscape have evolved simultaneously, with the number of threats increasing by orders of magnitude in short periods.
Hackers have evolved and plot each attack using unique exploits that render signature-based protections useless. Employee fraud and malicious acts have also intensified in sophistication. Successive hacks of Home Depot, Target, JP Morgan and NASDAQ demontrate the computing power cybercriminals now have at their disposal as well as their disturbing capability to inflict catastrophic damage to any organisation.
The rapid consumerisation of IT has increased these challenges. The average end user accesses numerous websites and employs a growing number of operating systems and apps daily, utilising a variety of mobile and desktop devices. Networks too have grown in size and complexity, forcing organisations to implement the latest cyber security point solutions to attempt to monitor and defend these networks.
Currently, security professionals are flooded with alerts daily from several firewalls and other security systems. They are left to choose among many alerts and use their own intuition in order to tackle those they feel are most critical. Most organisations still tend to store these security related data and forget about it. Hence, this presents an opportunity for the attackers to exploit the fact that security data is either in silos or not analysed in real-time, from all the security devices. These alerts translate to an overwhelming and ever-increasing volume, velocity and variety of security data generated.
According to Gartner, Big Data is high-volume, high-velocity and high-variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing for enhanced insight and decision-making. Big data security analytics provide great insights in the battle against cyber threats. Security analytics are not only about big data repositories; they are also about collecting lots of small bits of data from point security solutions to make better decisions. Big data analytics will enable organisations to identify unknown indicators of attack and uncover things like when compromised credentials are being used to bypass defenses by analysing data from previously unconnected security data sources. By looking at the intersections between data from multiple security sources, security professionals can more quickly identify what they need to prioritise.
Big data analytics will enable organisations to combine and correlate external and internal information to see a bigger picture of threats against their organisations. While security solutions prepared for the big data are emerging, security teams may not be ready. Data analysis is an area where internal knowledge of the staff may be lacking. The data scientists who specialise in security are few, and will continue to be in high demand. As a result, it is likely that many organisations will turn to external partners to compensate for their lack of skills in internal analysis. Going forward, big data will have an impact that will change most of the product categories in the field of computer security including solutions, network monitoring, authentication and authorisation of users, identity management, fraud detection, and systems of governance, risk and compliance.
Big data will also change the nature of security controls such as conventional firewalls, anti-malware and data loss prevention. In coming years, the tools of data analysis will evolve further to enable a number of advanced predictive capabilities and automated controls in real time.
Organisations should adopt big data analytics for at least one security and fraud detection use case. They should align the security capabilities in a holistic cyber security strategy tailored to the risks specific to the demands of the organisation. Successful protection relies on the right combination of methodologies, human insight, an expert understanding of the threat landscape, and the efficient processing of big data to create actionable intelligence. Big data analytics will play a crucial role in detecting crime and security infractions in the future, thus resulting in Smart Security.
(The writer is a Governance, Risk and Compliance professional and Director at Layers-7 Seguro Consultoria (Pvt) Ltd.
He can be emailed
at sujit@layers-7.com).