Defending the digital frontier from invisible threats

The internet is a tool that allows instantaneous and limitless ways to communicate and interact. Cyberspace has become a shorthand for computing devices, networks, fibre-optic cables, wireless links and other infrastructure that bring the internet to billions of people around the world. But connectivity comes with a price- Cyber Threats!

Individuals, organizations, markets, cities, states and even countries are prone to security threats from cyber-criminals, hacktivists and spies. Cyber thefts have become inevitable and are increasing in frequency, in sophistication and in impact. What can we do in such a scenario? How prepared are we to protect our data, systems and networks? The answer lies in empowering our security teams and corporations with sophisticated, state of the art cyber defense technology and products.

TaaSera Inc- A leader in Preemptive Breach Detection Systems (BDS) is launching a path breaking product to empower you to have a 360 degree view of your organization’s security structure. You can now detect evidence of a breach well in advance before any data is lost or stolen.

The challenge

The real challenge is to always stay a step ahead of a hacker and defeat the very possibility of an attack. Traditional Anti-virus, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS)/Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS), Fire Wall (FW) rely on old signature (pattern match) or sandbox technology to detect malware or other threats. No matter how advanced these tools get, they are only as good as the patterns they know what to look for. Other problems being lack of clear visibility and information overload. Information overload is sometimes part of the attack designed by hacker. The idea is to get security teams busy in false positive or non-creditable threats, while the actual attack vector remains invisible and comes into light only after a breach has taken place. These products are only good at “forensic analysis” (which is similar to post mortem). Think about it, the return on investment on such products is questionable as companies are paying for protecting themselves before the breach and not actually getting in depth attack details post the breach has taken place.

Another notion is that throwing everything at a big data engine or security products is the way to identify malicious behaviors. Better Data and not Big Data is the current rage in cyber security. Today’s coordinated attacks are multi-stage and multi-vector. A big data analytics tool is only as good as the content from data sources, and analysis without context does not establish threat relevance for remediation. Typical data sources such as log files, netflows and baselines are missing key indicators of malicious behaviors; seemingly benign activities that lead to data theft, damage or loss. As malware evolves and insiders operate in stealth mode, fewer and fewer data are showing up in these logs, flows and baselines. Big data analytics, misses the subtle patterns and sequences of related behaviors attackers use over time to deliver payloads, persist on endpoints, take hold across the network and exfiltrate or destroy data.

We must shift our thinking from big to better data analytics to successfully combat cyber threats. Security product’s analytic engines must be fed the otherwise hidden indicators of malicious behaviors, indicators that are only detected with the right type of detection engines.

To win the race against a hacker, we need cutting-edge cyber security products like NetTrust to analyze the pool of vast information automatically and provide the security team with exact details of any breach in progress. The right algorithms detect malicious behaviors in context and in real time, thus preventing data breaches and loss of business continuity.

Authored by Nitin Akarte, Vice President - System Engineering, TaaSera