Page 7 - Cyber Warnings - November 2015

An Open Letter to the Tentative: Automate … or What?

By Todd Weller, VP, Corporate Development, Hexis Cyber Solutions

Each year, StaySafeOnline.org and the NCSA deem October as National Cyber Security
Awareness Month (NCSAM). This is a collaborative effort between government and industry
organizations with a mission to educate, empower and remind the public of internet safety and
digital and technological protection. This is a great cause and much needed effort to keep the
general public cyber aware- not just in October, but every day.

Continuous awareness includes understanding the changing landscape of cyber threats and looking
for evolved solutions to combat the threats – solutions that work faster and more accurately than
their predecessors.

The onus has been put on industry vendors like us to develop solutions that will not only detect
malware, but that will efficiently respond to threats while decreasing the burden on IT professionals,
not increasing their workload.

Although the cyber market is well populated with an array of tools and products, two problems are
getting steadily worse (a) more kinds of threats are compromising networks ever faster, and (b) the
number of alerts and alarms demanding some kind of response just keeps escalating. It’s no
wonder IT departments feel like they’re losing the battle against cybercriminals.

The ingrained culture is to hire more people, with higher skill levels and buy them more tools –
unfortunately, this isn’t making the problem go away. Instead, these highly skilled resources are
spending their time and energy on manual and routine tasks instead of innovative ways to drive
security and the business forward.

We believe there’s only one way out … the judicious application of automated security response.
And yes, we mean up to and including some level of automated, computer speed threat removal.

Early attempts at automating IT, specifically security processes within IT, were not successful. It
took many forms of unsatisfactory performance but suffice it to say that yesterday’s blunt instrument
is not suitable for today’s critical IT infrastructure. We all know that the consequences of intrusive
actions are unacceptable.

7 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – November 2015 Edition
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