Cybersecurity and the Big Data Problem: Human Security Operations Alone Struggle to Keep Pace

Many of today’s cyberattacks are broken into multiple stages of activity, each of which on its own is often difficult to discern as malicious rather than benign. Discernment is even more difficult given the volume of legitimate activity within which it naturally occurs given the diversity of work styles, devices, networks, applications, and cloud-delivery locations.

Simply put, effective human security analysis is exceptionally hard given the requirement to look through huge amounts of data for increasingly ambiguous signs of attack that only become more clearly malicious when viewed together as a complete multi-stage campaign. Imagine trying to piece together a puzzle when the pieces are not only small with muted colors but also mixed together with pieces of other puzzles. That’s the task facing security analysts today.