Watson and Cybersecurity: The big data challenge

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Security is increasingly seen as a big data issue. The challenge these days is less about noticing that something isn’t right. The security landscape in 2016 was rocked with over 4 billion compromised records exposed. X-Force observed that tried and true methods like SQL injection, brute force attacks, malware toolkits and ransomware continue to be the attacker’s choice to gain access to valuable data. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of products available to spot anomalies and raise red flags — and even more to help you consume and act upon that knowledge. The number of alerts coming in just keeps increasing as we find more automated ways to identify malicious behaviour, and because there are more people on the dark side creating additional attacks.

Cognitive technologies are set to help organisations make sense of this is increasingly overwhelming cybersecurity landscape. The beta program for QRadar Advisor with Watson has offered a taste of what cognitive security can achieve: It has already proven its worth in a live customer environment, read here. And it gets even better:  Watson is a self-learning system – for good reasons by the way. After all: What it has learned so far is not all the security knowledge that will ever exist. It will keep expanding and refining both its corpus of knowledge and how that knowledge relates to the real world. This leads us to an enticing thought: What will Watson be able to do in the future?

“We were able to accelerate the analysis process by 50 percent,” –  Vincent Laurens, Cyber Security Practice Executive, Vice President, Sogeti Luxembourg

At the Watson Summit in Brussels and in Amsterdam you can discover how to use Watson to get better and quicker results for your security organization. There are workshops, demos and presentations for IT Security. Look beyond the hype and see how organizations can put cognitive technology into practice.
In one of the sessions Sogeti will talk about their journey using Watson technology in their SOC (Security Operations Centre). One of the results of working with Watson’s cognitive security capabilities is that SOC analysts of Sogeti were far more productive and could more accurately identify false positives — a critical step to reduce the “noise” that the analysts must sift through to identify threats. In the session, Sogeti will share their cognitive SOC experiences. To get the first glimpse watch this video of Sogeti on Watson for Security.

To learn more about cognitive security visit: www.ibm.com/security/cognitive

For more information on IBM Security solutions and services, visit: ibm.com/security