There’s a war occurring across our country. You can’t see it, but the effects are clear and it’s no longer a quiet one. According to last month’s MIT Technology Review, the Pentagon has gone public with its strategy to deploy an army of hackers in what is being called “America’s First Cyberwar.” Cyber security is the new frontier for fighting global terror groups like ISIS and at the center of this battle is big data and cyber analytics.
Securing the U.S. border is a heated topic and in this intense political year, there’s no shortage of opinions. But no matter which side of the “fence” you are on, there’s a revolution in security happening and it has nothing to do with brick and mortar and everything to do with the virtual wall of data that is changing the whole debate. The stats to back it up are anything but virtual. Advanced data analytics has improved the quality and speed of decision-making for 93 percent of federal government respondents with big data projects underway, according to a 2015 survey by Unisys Corporation. Simply put, integrated technology systems can capture and analyze data so effectively it becomes actionable information, allowing border control agents to be proactive like never before. And that’s not political rhetoric.
Federal IT leaders have the best possible cloud intentions – from Cloud First and Shared First to FDCCI and FedRAMP. And, there is motivation. By most accounts, 80 percent of Federal IT dollars are currently spent on life support for legacy systems – an equation that needs to change. This month GAO and OMB provided additional motivation.
Last week at AFCEA Cyberspace Symposium in Colorado Springs, I discovered something interesting - there are a lot of unimaginative people out there when it comes to creating passwords. At least evidenced by the top 5 passwords of 2015, which were shared in the opening keynote address. Understanding these pieces of cyber security, it’s clear that trust is built upon information superiority and information superiority relies on trust. If one piece of the cycle is compromised, the entire process breaks down. ViON’s DataAdapt Cyber Secure Solution mitigates the risk of such a break down by extracting useable information from multiple internal and external data sources and discovering actionable insights and gaining real-time security intelligence, while analyzing and monitoring external threats.
The reason we remain so ineffective in countering cyber attacks, even against attackers who are by many estimations amateurs, is that our posture consistently has a bias towards a forensic approach to attack activities. This approach is the equivalent of trying to counter an Ebola outbreak after it has already burned through a community with lethal results. The forensic approach – which is the dominant paradigm today – is not a viable method of defense and must be changed. It’s merely a method of recording the damage, not preventing it; it just counts the dead. It seems cliché, since it’s been said so many times: Data can be transformed into information, which can be turned into knowledge. But now there is a twist. Cyber, done correctly with the proper algorithms and computing power, can turn knowledge into actionable intelligence.
Imagine trying to find a white Toyota pickup truck in the middle of Baghdad and tracking it – or doing a facial recognition match with huge crowds of people entering a football stadium or maybe even a long line of visitors at a customs checkpoint for entry into the country. The task of finding something of interest within a huge pool of data can be daunting. It can be like looking through a haystack full of needles to find the one needle of interest.