Finding a security analyst with the data discovery experience to combat modern threats is like searching for the mythical unicorn. The person does not exist.
Recent high profile, high-impact data breaches across industries, including financial, healthcare, and retail, prove that today’s cybercriminals are adept at finding and fully exploiting even the smallest security gaps. Detection of their malicious activity often comes much too late – and at great cost for companies and their customers.
Not surprisingly, business leaders are starting to ask more of chief information security officers (CISOs) and other security operations personnel. They want assurance that the organization and its assets are protected. And they are, increasingly, looking for ways to leverage security analytics to strengthen cybersecurity. To do that, security analysts will need to bring three diverse skill sets to the table:
- Security domain expertise: The security analyst must understand security data, incident response, attack vectors, and more
- Data science expertise: The security analyst needs advanced analytical skills, like using machine learning and predictive analytics algorithms, and should know how to prepare data for analysis
- MapReduce/Spark/Storm/Hive/Pig expertise: The security analyst must be able to code a number of big data technologies designed to optimize analysis of petabytes of data.
Translate security incidents into business impact: Security analysts need a centralized view of IT, user, business application data and security event data. Multi-structured data must coexist in a single repository, and be transformed and correlated so that the outcome of security investigations is about business impact.
The unicorn is a mythical creature, but a security analyst with deep security domain expertise is certainly not. When you support a skilled security analyst with security analytics on big data, your organization will be able to gain a complete picture of network and data security risks, and more quickly detect and mitigate advanced cyber-attacks.
Source: Cyber Security Intelligence
