COGNITIVE CYBERSECURITYCONCEPTS AND PRACTICES

Bob KalkaVP, IBM Security

© 2016 IBM Corporation

The Lifecycle of Security Intelligence

Is this really sustainable ?Too Much Data, Not Enough Resources

Threats Alerts Analystsavailable

Quick Insights : Current Security Status

Availabletime

”93% SOC Managers Not Able to Triage All Potential Threats”

“42 percent of cybersecurity professionals working at enterprise organizations claim that they ignore a ‘significant number of security alerts’”

“(31 percent) of organizations forced to ignore security alerts claim they ignore 50 percent or more security alerts because they can’t keep up with the overall volume”

Knowledgeneeded

Cognitive Security Study revealed three gaps to address

#2 most challenging area today is optimizing accuracy alerts (too many false positives)

#3 most challenging area due to insufficient resources is threat identification, monitoring and escalating potential incidents (61% selecting)

Speed gap

The top cybersecurity challenge today and tomorrow is reducing average incident response and resolution time

This is despite the fact that 80% said their incident response speed is much faster than two years ago

Accuracy gapIntelligence gap

#1 most challenging area due to insufficient resources is threat research (65% selecting)

#3 highest cybersecurity challenge today is keeping current on new threats and vulnerabilities (40% selecting)

Addressing gaps while managing cost and ROI pressures

TraditionalSecurity Data

A tremendous amount of security knowledge is created for human consumption,

Examples include:

• Research documents

• Industry publications

• Forensic information

• Threat intelligence commentary

• Conference presentations

• Analyst reports

• Webpages

• Wikis

• Blogs

• News sources

• Newsletters

• Tweets

A universe of security knowledgeDark to your defensesTypical organizations leverage only 8% of this content*

Human Generated Knowledge

• Security events and alerts

• Logs and configuration data

• User and network activity

• Threat and vulnerability feeds

but most of it is untapped

Human Expertise

Cognitive Security

Cognitive systems bridge this gap and unlock a new partnership between security analysts and their technology

Security Analytics• Data correlation

• Pattern identification

• Anomaly detection

• Prioritization

• Data visualization

• Workflow

• Unstructured analysis

• Natural language

• Question and answer

• Machine learning

• Bias elimination

• Tradeoff analytics

• Common sense

• Morals

• Compassion

• Abstraction

• Dilemmas

• Generalization SECURITY ANALYSTS

SECURITY ANALYTICS

COGNITIVESECURITY

Watson enables greater insights by ingesting extensive data sources

*IBM intends to deliver in the future as a QRadar app

IBM Watsonfor cyber security

Corpus of Knowledge

Threat databases

Research reports

Security textbooks

Vulnerability disclosures

Popular websites

Blogs and social activity

Other

Security events

User activity

Configuration information

Vulnerability results

System and app logs

Security policies

Other

TEST

LEARN

EXPERIENCE

INGEST

Human GeneratedSecurity KnowledgeSourced by available IBM Security and IBM Research

EnterpriseSecurity AnalyticsCorrelated enterprise data

Not just a search engine, we’re teaching Watson to understand and interpret the language of security

Rich dictionaries enable Watson to link all entity representations

Machine learning enables Watson for Cyber Security to teach itself over time

Watson Creates Knowledge Graph

Watson Applies Annotators to Text

Annotator Logic

TEST

INGEST

EXPERIENCE

LEARN

Hash IoC ArtifactInfectionMethodsThreat Name

Beyond mere algorithms, Watson evaluates supporting evidence

Score and Weigh

ExtractEvidence

Search Corpus

Question

• Quantity

• Proximity

• Relationship

• Domain truths / business rules

Whatvulnerabilities are relevant to this type of infection?

• Research reports

• Security websites

• Publications

• Threat intelligence

• Internal scans

• Asset information

INGEST

EXPERIENCE

LEARN

TEST

TEST

INGEST

LEARN

EXPERIENCE

The result Watson for Cyber Security will enable breakthrough insights after analyzing unstructured articles and other corpus data in minutes

What is fed into Watson for Cyber Security

1 Week 1 Hour5 Minutes

StructuredSecurity Data

X-Force Exchange Trusted Partner Data

Open sourcePaid data

- Indicators- Vulnerabilities

- Malware names, …

- New actors- Campaigns- Malware outbreaks- Indicators, …

- Course of action- Actors

- Trends- Indicators, …

Crawl of CriticalUnstructured Security Data

Massive Crawl of all SecurityRelated Data on Web

Breach repliesAttack write-ups

Best practices

BlogsWebsitesNews, …

Filtering + Machine LearningRemoves Unnecessary Information

Machine Learning / Natural Language Processing

Extracts and Annotates Collected Data

Billions ofData Elements

Millions of Documents

5-10 updates / hour! 100K updates / week!

3:1 Reduction

Massive Security Knowledge GraphBillions of Nodes / Edges

There are numerous potential use cases where we could envision cognitive security playing a key role

Enhance your SOC analysts

Speed response with external intelligence

Identify threats with advanced

analytics

Strengthen application

security

Improve enterprise risk

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Statement of Good Security Practices: IT system security involves protecting systems and information through prevention, detection and response to improper access from within and outside your enterprise. Improper access can result in information being altered, destroyed, misappropriated or misused or can result in damage to or misuse of your systems, including for use in attacks on others. No IT system or product should be considered completely secure and no single product, service or security measure can be completely effective in preventing improper use or access. IBM systems, products and services are designed to be part of a lawful, comprehensive security approach, which will necessarily involve additional operational procedures, and may require other systems, products or services to be most effective. IBM DOES NOT WARRANT THAT ANYSYSTEMS, PRODUCTS OR SERVICES ARE IMMUNE FROM, OR WILL MAKE YOUR ENTERPRISE IMMUNE FROM, THE MALICIOUS OR ILLEGAL CONDUCT OF ANY PARTY.

© 2016 IBM Corporation