Boosting Your Security Posture with Security Analytics

With the rise of cyberincidents, organizations continue to search for effective tools and strategies to fight against cybercrimes and to build resilience in their environment. Based on the 2017 Trustwave Report[1], cyberincidents were spread across economic sectors and regions during the reporting year. Every single region was affected, with North America and the Asia-Pacific regions accounting for the bulk of reported cases (70%). The retail industry had the single largest share of cyber incidents (22%), followed by the food and beverage (20%), finance and insurance (14%), hospitality (12%). Technology, transport, entertainment, travel and other sectors accounted for the remaining 32%. These revealing statistics emphasize the continued urgent need for organizations to shore up the cybersecurity defenses while proactively engaging in offensive tactics. Given the growing complexity of cybersecurity management, automated tools are often required to assist in detecting hidden patterns and potential threats. The use of these tools should ideally be deployed before a security breach occurs. The advances in technologies and the growth of big-data analytics have resulted in organizations now depending on security analytics to help in their cybersecurity management. Security analytics is an automated tool used to help organizations make better decisions in relation to their information security. It is focused on the large-scale analysis and processing of an organization environment or network data to inform security decisions. This is accomplished through real-time collection, analyzing and filtering of data from multiple information sources, such as user activities, corporate and internal network activities, point-of sale, ecommerce and social media activities.

The analysis of these types of activities are intended to achieve certain business and security objectives, such as:

• Detecting data exfiltration attempts;
• Detecting improper account usage;
• Employee monitoring;
• Detecting non-compliance activities; and
• Detecting network anomalies.

Security analytics offers several benefits, such as:

• Improved understanding and management of security events;
• Improved efficiency in the detection and remediation of security threats;
• Improved organizing and management of the overall security portfolio;
• Real-time visualization capabilities to assist in detecting and analyzing security events and trends;
• Improved understanding of the root cause of cyber security incidents;
• Improved tracking and reduction of insider threats, frauds and data leakage;
• Improved ability for organizational learning about security threats thereby enabling more proactive approaches to security management; and
• Cost savings.

Based on the benefits of security analytics, it ought to be essential part of the daily security management processand used in conjunction with other existing cyber security measures. Additionally, a process-oriented approach to deploying security analytics is one of the best way to effectively leverage these solutions. This means integrating the business and security objectives in the knowledge discovery activities and carefully evaluating the new knowledge and patterns for improved security management. Wilson Consulting Group offerssecurity intelligence and analytic servicesthat can assist organizations in identifying previously unknown patterns, usage trends and other insights that can strengthen their security management. Our security analytic solution helps organizations build network resilience by providing insightful analysis, detection and forensics.WCG has an experienced and qualified team that can assist you in making the necessary steps to effectively leveraging your security investments by using security analytics to improve your security posture.

[1]2017 TrustwaveGlobal SecurityReport