30/May/2019
It won’t come as a surprise to learn that business growth is a top priority for business leaders. And, with limited avenues for growth in traditional ways, they are turning to digital to improve revenue and boost market share. However, despite its many advantages, this growth is exposing them to greater risks, especially those associated with digital business components. In his latest blog, CyNation CTO Shadi Razak considers the options available to them to tackle these risks.
He writes: While organisations spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on endpoint security solutions to manage and treat digital risks, cyber attacks and the cost of security breaches are growing fast, leaving organisations doubting their cyber and risk resilience and the effectiveness of defences. This is despite the growth in spending on security solutions, advice and training. So why are cyber security solutions falling short in reducing risks?
Cyber security today is broken
Current cyber security solutions protect the traditional perimeters of an organisation. Rapid growth of business digitalisation and growing reliance on cloud computing and third-party technologies means that such boundaries are virtually disappearing.
Most traditional security solutions focus on detecting and preventing infiltration of the organisation and gaining better understanding of attack characteristics. But just focusing on chasing the bad guys won’t help us protect the organisation. We are providing attackers with the asymmetric advantage to succeed. And while they only need to get it right once: we must get it right every time. The annual number of attacks an organisation faces can reach hundreds of millions. We are supposed to detect each one, understand and analyse its characteristics, and prevent it.
So we are playing “catch-up” with attackers and cyber criminals, who are using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to automate the creation and delivery of cyber attacks.
Cyber security is an AI and ML job
AI and machine learning (ML) can aid security professionals in improving the organisation’s security posture. The most significant benefit of adopting AI as part of the organisation’s security programme, is increased speed in detecting and analysing threats and malicious behaviour.
Organisations can waste a fortune reacting to false security alerts and fallacious risk intelligence. Security analysts usually get caught analysing false positive alerts and researching dead ends, while missing legitimate malicious and criminal activities. AI can help prioritise alerts and identify attack patterns they might miss due to the overwhelming number of alerts and the limited capabilities of traditional solutions. Training such solutions by the use of machine learning can apply human-like intuition analysis to every interaction between the systems, and pluck unusual behaviour from millions to be reviewed by security professionals. Shortening time to detection is critical: identifying the average breach takes over 197 days.
Another benefit of adopting AI and ML as part of an organisation’s security programme is enforcing good security practices to reduce the attack surface. Next generation cyber security and digital risk solutions increasingly deploy cutting edge AI techniques and ML models to correlate attacks, events and intelligence across time, departments and geography to gain a better risk picture and its impact on the organisation’s performance and resilience.
CyDesk
CyNation’s Digital Risk Management Platform combines various digital risks: cyber security, regulatory compliance, financial crime and ESG into one dashboard. Powered by AI and ML, its Risk Fusion Engine and proprietary risk triangulation technique give organisations the ability to aggregate and augment risk indicators and develop a better picture of what’s happening within their digital ecosystem. As a result, the platform will provide organisations with on-going visibility of all third-party systems they interact with in real-time, while the security team gains a holistic view of the threats and risks they expose the business to, the impacts of the dangers on the business performance, and recommended treatments to mitigate and manage such risks.
