IBM to fight cybercrime with ‘cloud’

Sunaina Rana / Emirates Business

As the country advances towards new technical industrialisation, cyber threat is a growing concern among various sectors. In wake of the same, IBM security has recently announced a new cloud-based version of the company’s cognitive technology trained on the language of security as part of a year-long research project.
Ahmed El-Zaher, Security Unit Leader, IBM Middle East and Africa, in an exclusive conversation with Emirates Business highlighted the prime concerns, “IBM Security is now aiming to fully outpace and outthink the bad guys by spearheading an industry shift from security analytics to cognitive security, evolving from the one dimensional nature of security analytics to multi-dimensional systems that closely mimic human reasoning and continue to get smarter as they are taught.”
El-Zaher further informed that Watson for Cyber Security is a response to today’s status quo, which, for the average security analyst, currently translates to sifting through 200,000 security events per day,
attempting to harness insights from the 60,000 security blog posts published every month and wasting
over 20,000 hours annually chasing false positives.
“Watson for Cyber Security can interpret, learn, and process the critical security intelligence – originally designed by and for humans – to enable analysts to respond to threats at a speed and scale previously unimagined. Watson for Cyber Security takes the guesswork out of fighting cybercrime by understanding the context of unstructured data. Cognitive Cyber Security systems are not designed to simply provide analysts with more intelligence – instead, they will guide them to take the correct next steps and actions based on the system’s collective (and contextual) learned body of knowledge,” he added.
Starting this fall, IBM will work with leading universities and their students to further train Watson on the language of cybersecurity. “IBM’s Institute for Business Value surveyed more than 700 C-level executives (CEOs, CIOs, CFOs, CHROs, CMOs, etc — everyone but the CISO) on Cyber Security. The study found that many leaders across the C-suite are confused about the true Cyber Security adversary is and how to effectively combat them,” he added.
The volume of security data presented to analysts is staggering.
Elaborating on the challenges faced and the way to overcome these threats, El-Zaher said, “To overcome the growing cyber pandemic, organisations need to develop comprehensive Cyber Security plans that encompass People, Processes and Tools. They need to look at in an integrated approach like an Immune System. They need to utilize threat intelligence data to have a single view across their organisation. Big data and analytics, where IBM is the clear leader, are they key to detection and prevention.”
“In addition to real time analytics, the sharing of threat data is critical. IBM disrupted the industry when we opened up our own extensive threat database as a catalyst to spark this global collaboration that will help safeguard our economies and privacy. It was a highly disruptive move in the Cyber Security space, turning many
of the traditional threat intelligence models on their heads, as other
companies charge for this data,” he concluded.