Big Data, Big Mess: Sound Risk Intelligence Through Complete Context
When it comes to cybersecurity, perhaps nothing has been as highly touted as the answer to every executive's prayers as big data. Cybercrime, being inherently technical, can provide vast droves of data to be analyzed.
The real challenge is translating complex, technical cyber data into practical information that can be easily understood by the business as well as security pros. Many variables come into play when it comes to understanding cyber risk: your industry sector, infrastructure, company size, supply chain, location, your online presence, and many more factors. At the core of it, cyber data needs to be relevant and useful to its audience. There are a ton of operations furiously collecting and combing through huge bins of packet data and terabytes of log files, and they serve their purpose. But focusing too much at that lower level provides only partial context to the business and can be a disservice to those who want to know what attacks are hitting their organization, how, and what's happening as a result.
This paper explores the good, bad and ugly of big data in cybersecurity and provides tips for understanding cyber risk in complete context of the business.