May 12th, 2017 saw the spread of ransomware strain ‘’WannaCry’’ infecting the systems of thousands of individuals, corporate, and public utility companies. The attack created panic and chaos for many patients as many vital medical services were delayed due to the effect of WannaCry.
In recent times Cyber-crimes such as the above or like the recent one “Bad Rabbit”, have become too common with hackers finding newer and more intense methods of hacking and breaching systems worldwide. The threat of cyber-crime looms over both corporates and individuals, and it does not seem to lower its intensity anytime soon. While the economic damage due to cyber-crimes is undoubtedly massive there is also the moral and reputational damage. As per the recent reports, around 60-70% of attacks are happening due to insider threats, which makes it too important to keep a track of the users and entities of the organizations to predict, detect and defend against the threats.
Why is Cyber Security so important?
In 2016, an estimated 90 million individuals and companies were hit by cyber-attacks, which was around 247,000 of attacks every single day. Experts say that about 70% of attacks go unnoticed and yet don’t fail to cause massive damages. On average, hacking costs a company $15.4 million per attack; a very costly affair!
With Cyber security becoming a board room discussion, large scale Cyber-attacks are becoming a threat to the global economy and can endanger institutions both private and public beyond imagination. Unfortunately, the current cyber security measures fall terribly short of their objectives and it is here that behavioral analytics is set to play a pivotal role.
Traditional signature-based solutions not developed to protect organizations from advanced or insider attacks are finding it difficult to fend off the looing threats.
With the advancement of threats, the new and advanced solutions are leveraging machine learning and behaviour analytics that analyses and cross-correlate interactions between users, systems, and data to detect insider threats while adhering to compliance.
Behaviour Analytics coming handy to detect threats
Attacks are certain because they have been orchestrated by cyber-criminals bent on either taking ransom or just creating havoc out of sheer sadistic pleasure. While a stronger security strategy is the need of the hour, , the threats are becoming advanced with sophisticated means, resulting to breaches.
How analytics can help prevent breaches-
Beyond Correlation: An isolated event might look uneventful or harmless but if mapped into context often results into identifying vulnerabilities. With the help of machine learning and behavioural analytics a security analyst can correlate data from various users, devices and entities to predict, detect and prevent threats which were missed by traditional solutions..
Real Time analytics: The real-time behaviour analytics engine detects advanced attack activities using machine learning techniques. The recent tools are built to rapidly spot key features of advanced threats without prior knowledge of the attack or relying on traditional signatures, rules, or threat intelligence. The real time behavioural system expedites the detection of abnormal activities and anomalies in the organization’s ecosystem.
Predictive and Adaptive Learning: The new tools go beyond the traditional signature based threat detection process. The latest solutions use machine learning to predict and adapt to the new anomalies cropping up. The algorithm based solutions tracks the events to predict any vulnerability, for example an outgoing employee will be put flagged for elevated risk and might be subjected to extra scrutiny with access checks and increased authentication checks. This helps identify threats real time while going beyond the signature tracking technology.
Conclusion
Going forward – Prevent, Detect, and Respond is the formula for countering quickly evolving and sophisticated threats. Behavioural analytics, based on machine learning, with its ability to predict attack patterns while accelerating the speed at which security analysts can discover malicious traffic, is the way ahead.
The legacy cyber security systems can no longer hold against the sophisticated attacks, as the best of protected systems get breached. The eventual solution is behavioural analytics which enables rapid and accurate analysis, correlation and identification of events and patterns that could indicate malicious attacks and defend against them.
Cyber Security is no longer an option, it is an essential, and with behavioral analytics in your armoury might prove to be the the powerful weapon in the arsenal any organization can think of to fight against the cyber threats.
Sandeep is the Head of Marketing for Infrastructure Management and Security Services in Happiest Minds Technologies. Prior to Happiest Minds, he was the Marketing Manager for IBM QRadar, IBM Security for almost 5 years.With about 11+ years of experience in product marketing, market intelligence, and business development, he specializes in product management and marketing functions across multiple enterprise software and systems integration domains. He has done his MBA in Marketing and Bachelors in e-Commerce.
