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Understanding the enemy enables organizations to adjust their defensive strategies and
techniques appropriately. Leveraging threat intelligence is a key factor in that.

3) The investment in cybersecurity personnel is on the rise.

As the cybersecurity landscape evolves, teams are ripping out antiquated defenses (and
people) and introducing new solutions and teams designed to accomplish two things:

1) Create defensible postures

2) Achieve cyber resiliency

Good leaders understand the need for a strong core of people, supported by technology that
enables the team to be effective and fast. The goal is to create an environment where
unauthorized code or unauthorized access does not lead to a massive, headline-making breach.

Additionally, organizations are increasingly hiring experts with law enforcement or defense
community backgrounds and empowering them to build out a team comprising full-time
programmers and other resources. Such practices were extremely rare even just a couple of
years ago.

4) Data and intelligence analytics are very popular

It seems that security is not to be left out of the big data bandwagon, and with good reason. It is
becoming increasingly difficult to pick out the suspicious traffic or malicious executables from
the volumes of enterprise noise. Combine this with attackers’ ability to “live off the land,” (use
built-in Microsoft and other tools) means that defenders have to move faster to compare current
and historical activity to find anomalies.

While analytics isn’t a new concept, the security community’s discussion about them, the
number of thought leaders pushing them, and the number of vendors trying to provide an
analytics solution is exploding.

5) The endpoint is the new perimeter.

Security teams are beginning to assume that ALL of their assets, especially endpoints, are not
adequately protected behind traditional, penetrable perimeters such as antivirus. Building a
higher wall will no longer suffice. The perimeter, while still important, is deteriorating. By
focusing on endpoint protection, security teams are putting their defenses where critical data
resides.

Integrating network and endpoint defense (i.e., “layered” security) is an approach the many
security teams are moving toward. The fact that more employees are working remotely or often
traveling means organizations need to do more than just slide a network appliance into their
rack to be secure. Before this year, the endpoint had been largely overlooked. 2015, however,
will be the “year of the endpoint.”
39 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – December 2014 Edition
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