Elizabeth Leigh
Data visualization is as significant a component of cybersecurity as resources, personnel or the data itself, Tim White, global head of government and intelligence at YarcData, wrote in a Jan. 22 op-ed in the New York Times.
Click here to read White’s full piece “Finding a Needle in a Haystack”
According to the executive, the recent escalation of high-profile attacks on retailers highlights the ever-growing need for efficient data analytics to make sense of the massive amounts of information and identify the weak links and possible hack entry points.
“What we need… is not necessarily more money or information but a better way of knowing what it means, of interpreting the data to discover an unknown attack as it happens or, even better, anticipate the next attack,†White wrote.
The question, White said, is how to speed up identification of problem spots so they are thwarted in time, a challenge White said graph analytics attempts to address.
According to the article, a company deals with a billion gigabytes of security-related data that reside across various servers and are used by a number of software applications.
This could mean pinpointing a hack attack by sorting through and putting into context the thousands of security alerts that the firm receives each day.
“(With graph analytics), objects and their relationships uncover connections that are hidden in the numbers but obvious to the eye,†White explains.
“A failed attack on one computer might not raise a flag on its own, but it could if an analyst saw, simultaneously, that the target was connected to other critical targets, or that the attack was a modification of a recent failed attack,†he adds.
