Cybersecurity is in the news a lot, and typically in a bad way.
We learn about Cybersecurity through well-publicized cyberattacks on major financial institutions, corporations, social media platforms, hospitals and cities. These attacks cost organizations and individuals billions of dollars a year, and hackers show no signs of slowing down. If anything, attacks are growing more clever and complex by the day. They can involve:
- Identity theft or theft of other sensitive data;
- Ransomware, where a hacker locks up a computer system and offers to reopen it for a price;
- Virus or Trojan Horse attacks that disable individual computers or export data from them;
- Denial-of-service attacks that disable computer servers; and
- Keylogging attacks that steal passwords or financial information.
The industry has developed myriad Cybersecurity tools to combat these threats. In the beginning, there were firewalls placed between private networks and the Internet to protect corporate servers, along with anti-virus software that detected and guarded against attacks on individual computers. These have evolved over time so that now there are dozens of Cybersecurity systems that aim to protect specific parts of the cyberattack surface, from network endpoints and individual computers to servers, applications and websites.
Specific solutions include:
- Endpoint Detection and Response systems (EDRs)
- Security Information and Event Managers (SIEMs)
- User Event Behavior and Analysis (UEBA)
- Intrusion Detection and Protection Systems (IDPS)
- Next-generation Firewalls
- Anti-Virus Software
- Identity Management Systems
- Data Loss Prevention Systems
The Cybersecurity market has seen an explosion of solutions for specific problems, so much so that a typical enterprise has a dozen or more Cybersecurity systems in place. Each system requires one or more security analysts to manage and monitor it, so security staffs have grown over time. And despite ramped-up efforts to train new security analysts, these professionals are relatively scarce and command high salaries.
But even with a dozen Cybersecurity systems in place, it can be difficult to spot complex attacks. After all, each analyst sees only a small part of the whole picture, and complex attacks can involve performing relatively innocent-looking operations in several different parts of the infrastructure. For example, an executive logs into the network at 2AM. Then, the executive establishes a connection to a server in Russia. Finally, the executive begins exporting data from the corporate server to the server in Russia. These events would be caught by different Cybersecurity systems, and it would be up to the separate analysts to compare notes and determine that an attack was underway – a process that could take hours, days or even weeks.
Today, the state of the art in Cybersecurity is to collect data from all of the disparate security tools, correlate it to reveal complex attacks, and respond immediately when an attack occurs. So far, only Stellar Cyber has such a comprehensive approach. Stellar Cyber’s platform can collect data from existing firewall, SIEM, EDR, IDPS and other systems as well as its own sensors to capture a complete picture of the Cybersecurity situation, and then correlate that data to discover cyberattacks. This approach is not only faster and more accurate at detecting attacks, but it also increases analyst productivity and reduces operational costs.
Hackers will of course keep inventing new Cybersecurity exploits, but by collecting and analyzing data from throughout the cyber kill chain, analysts will be much better prepared to discover them. Stellar Cyber offers that power today.
