It isn’t that they didn’t have cyber security, but rather that the security platform they had was insufficient against these new threats that aren’t your average run-of-the mill hacks.
In order to understand what makes cyber security like Strixus invaluable, you first need to understand the new nature of these attacks. Once you understand that, it is possible to go about safeguarding your digital information.
The Interconnectedness of the Internet
The greatest concern seems to be the very thing that makes the Internet as valuable as it is: the interconnected relationship between computers around the globe.
Within a nanosecond, a business in Los Angeles can share large files with someone in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, that’s a double edged sword.
The very same capacity to share large amounts of useful data can also lead to an attack of global proportions, virtually shutting down the Internet for hours, if not days, until the threat can be isolated and ‘disarmed.’
However, that is just one concern and in recent years, attacks have taken on a different focus.
Attacks Are Becoming More Targeted
Whereas there was a time when everyone from the largest corporations to individuals with home PCs were concerned with viral attacks that were indiscriminate in their choice of targets, this new breed of threats focuses on individual businesses or networks that they want to bring down.
These hacks are not usually viral in nature, but they can have widespread implications. One of the more recent examples is the hack on the AshleyMadison.com cheating site.
The hackers didn’t want to spread havoc across the Internet, they just wanted to obtain private information on the site’s server.
Cyber security monitoring such as that in the Strixus platform could have prevented the hack because it would have detected chatter from the underground communities, active exploit discussions and threat actors testing vulnerabilities against their system.
However, Strixus even goes beyond that by detecting languages of non-English threat intelligence chatter and converting this chatter into actionable and positive threats.
Down to the Deepest Levels Where Danger Lurks
Since much of this activity takes place in the deeper levels of the Internet, it goes unnoticed by humans because nothing is happening on the surface web where it can be ‘seen.’
The surface, or common web, is the level which most people understand as the Internet. This is where people communicate through email, chat rooms and social media and where companies conduct business.
It’s what the layman thinks of as the World Wide Web. But there are other levels of the Internet where other activities take place and these are the layers where cyber security monitoring does its work.
The beauty of it is that hi tech security platforms such as Strixus are able to seek out threats much quicker than humans ever could because they are programmed to learn to ‘read’ the emotional intent of packets of data being transmitted.
A Joint Effort of Man and Machine
Once that data is gathered, humans work to decipher whether or not any real threat exists. This is why Artificial Intelligence is such an important factor in gathering critical information that can be brought to the surface where humans can then interpret it.
What makes cyber security monitoring like Strixus invaluable is the way in which the speed of Artificial Intelligence (AI) gathers information about potential threats so that Human Intelligence (HUMINT) can determine whether or not there is a threat and then work to prevent the attack.
Instead of relying solely on security software, Strixus combines the speed of data mining and AI with human interpretation, offering levels of defense not possible when one is used independent of the other. This, in a nutshell, is what makes a cyber-security monitoring system like Strixus so invaluable.
