Cybersecurity and big data analytics: partners in crime fighting

Organizations often struggle to keep up with the current evolutions in cybercrime. They are spending billions of dollars on IT security. And still the insight in the threat landscape remains limited and scattered. That’s where big data and analytics come in.

It is hard to imagine a month, or even a week, without a data or security breach that made the media headlines. Enough headlines to have every boardroom devote valuable time on the topic of how to avoid such breaches for their own organization. And yet, according to Ponemon Institute, an average of 35 percent of all cyberattacks go undetected.

Organizations often struggle to keep up with the current evolutions in cybercrime. They are spending billions of dollars on IT security. US federal government agencies alone spend 14.5 billion dollars on IT security, according to research agency IDC. The financial services industry even spends 27.4 billion dollar on information security and fraud fighting. And still the insight in the threat landscape remains limited and scattered.

In order to change that, they need to shift from reactive to proactive strategies that seek to understand a threat before an attacker can cause damage. This, in turn, requires constant monitoring of network behavior so that normal behavior can be distinguished from unusual activity.

That’s where big data and analytics come in. Storing and analyzing huge amounts of network traffic data requires some advanced big data technology: predictive behavioral analytics and a big data framework such as Hadoop.

That seems to be the consensus in IDC’s research paper ‘Big Data and Predictive Analytics: On the Cybersecurity Frontline’ as well. The new big data solutions should evolve from the reactive ‘collect and analyze’ approach towards a more proactive and predictive approach, based on users’ behavior, IDC concludes from various interviews with CIO’s and CSO’s (Chief Security Officers).

As the cybersecurity threat increases and evolves, progressive organizations are realizing that one of their strongest resources to fight this threat lies in the growing volume of data at their disposal - and the increasing power of technologies to act on this data”, concludes IDC. Sounds familiar? That is exactly what SAS has been doing for a few decades already. And what they will be doing for the cybersecurity area as well, with tools such as the recently released SAS Cybersecurity.

Read more about IDC’s findings here.
Read more about SAS Cybersecurity here

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