One day, a contractor working for an internet service provider decided to sabotage the company by disabling internet connectivity for all customers. Unfortunately, the employee's attack was successful, and the disruption lasted three weeks. This attack cost the company tens of thousands in remediation costs and left many customers struggling to navigate a world without the internet.
Human beings have been dubbed as one of the most significant risks when it comes to cyber security in organizations. Behind every breach is a human or entity orchestrating an attack to make it happen. Within the affected organization, there is usually a human action that leads to the success of the attack.
A few years ago, a news story about a man who was being paid six figures to watch cat videos went viral. Unfortunately, his company didn’t realize that this is what they were paying him to do all day. How did this happen? The employee, whom we’ll refer to as “John,” worked for a company in the US and was getting paid six figures as a developer.
A lot could happen within 100 days. One could start a new company, travel around the world or train for a marathon. One hundred days is also around the average time that attackers spend frolicking around compromised networks before being detected. For countries in Europe, Middle East, and Africa the number goes up to 175, or almost half of a year. To make matters worse, the longer a breach remains undetected the more expensive it becomes.
Once upon a time, protecting critical data assets meant keeping printed confidential information in locked boxes labeled top secret. As long as these boxes were kept in secured areas, all was well. Today, information has no such physical boundaries. Network perimeters and firewalls have become the new walls, and data classification schemas are the new box labels. This shift led to an evolution in how companies protected their data from leaving their environments.
Veriato, the leader in the user activity monitoring and analysis market, today reported that their inaugural Police User Group was a resounding success seeing Police staff attend from all over the UK. The event hosted in London demonstrated Veriato's ongoing commitment in providing an essential active monitoring solution used by Professional Standards and Anti-Corruption units across 75% of UK Police forces.
It’s estimated that Ransomware costs will climb to roughly $11.5 billion in 2019, according to CSO Online. The frequency of attacks continues to increase as well. According to a report on Ransomware, these attacks occurred once every 120 seconds in early 2016. By 2017 this spiked to an attack occurring every 40 seconds. In 2019, the frequency is expected to grow to an attack happening every 14 seconds.
At a point in time, smart devices and robotics were common elements in the storyline of futuristic fictional novels. Today, those concepts are the modern norm across the technology industry. Similarly, in cybersecurity, pioneering professionals held on to seemingly far-fetched dreams where logs were easy to analyze, and false positives didn’t exist. While these challenges still exist, artificial intelligence (AI) is making these once far-fetched dreams the new norm in the security industry.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is used all around us and if you’ve used some sort of voice activated technology to make your life easier, then there was likely some element of AI involved. Some of the most notable examples include Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Tesla semi-autonomous vehicles. Individual consumers no longer have to fumble around in the dark to flip the light switch at home, manually search playlists for songs, or type in a password to get into smartphones.
