Recently there has been a lot of attention in the media around the incidents where  Chinese Government and agencies have attacked American infrastructure and organizations to steal information. We have also seen Cyber Criminals have hacked into companies like Apple and Facebook. The scale and range of such possible attacks has huge implications for National Security, which has led to the Cybersecurity 3.0 initiatives by the US Government. If this continues, they are seeing great danger to critical public infrastructure like electric grids, water supply, defense  and financial systems. A posts on The White House Blog by Schmidt outlines the new cyber security strategy. This is now becoming a global issue and countries like United States are spear heading this initiative with a great deal of urgency. The article “World War 3.0” in the Vanity Fair magazine by Michael Joseph Gross describes it as “ a new global conflict that could split the virtual world as we know it.”. With the evolution of the information technology the threat landscape has evolved. As we Americans has become more reliant on modern technology, we have become more vulnerable to cyber attacks. Take a look at the data around the 2012 Cyber Attacks Statistics.

This is not a hype, it is real

I was at the RSA conference yesterday and was amazed at the vendor solutions that are already gearing up to address this security gap. Real-time security intelligent systems with the use of Big Data controls is where the solutions landscape is heading. Though lot of  innovation in this area is yet to happen, it’s still in the early stages. This is a good time that all security vendors start thinking about this space more seriously. Vendors like Juniper and RSA are becoming the industry leaders in this area and are rapidly innovating and sharing information around CyberSecurity threats to the community.

Real-Time Intelligence Driven Security Solution Attributes

The days are over where we knew what are the types and the factors that lead to security threats around our information infrastructure. We are moving into a territory of known unknowns and unknown knowns. Hence the security realm around infrastructure, systems, network, users and data has to be enforced at real-time through Big Data control and advanced machine learning algorithms. This would require that we gather the right and valuable data about our infrastructure, systems, network, users, gather intelligence knowledge base  in a data ware house and constantly analyze the anomalies and threat levels and take appropriate actions. Below is a picture that highlights the attributes that are critical for  a “Real-Time Intelligence Driven Security” Solution

The need for real-time security intelligence is becoming a necessity and coming up with new innovative solution is important.  The security model of the past has evolved and changed. Security vendors have to think of new strategies of using Big Data and machine learning and support automated tools within their security solution to build  intelligent predictive models to address new security threats.

Hope you all see the same trend as me!