“There are too few defenders to collect, process, and analyze the overwhelming amount of available data to produce threat intelligence,” McGladrey told HITInfrastruture.com. “The promise of machine learning is to allow computers to do what they do well, in automating the collection and processing of indicators of compromise, and analyzing those data against both known and emerging threats.”

The team at Aurora IT interviewed me for a feature-length podcast on cybersecurity. Listen to hear about third-party attacker tactics, managing cyber risk, multi-factor authentication, and why a lack of diversity is a threat to public safety.

For many organizations, analysts in security operations centers spend their days sifting through hoards of log files for suspicious activity. The repetitive nature of this work makes AI an ideal replacement, says Kayne McGladrey, IEEE Member, Director of Information Security Services at Integral Partners (US): “Artificial intelligence has been shown to be good at pattern recognition and correlation over a vast number of data points, and can make connections faster than human analysts would.”

"We will continue to see artificial intelligence deployed in the security operations center (SOC). Most SOC jobs are checklist-driven, particularly for first- and second-tier analysts who review logs for indicators of compromise (IoCs),"

Expanding on this, national cyber security expert and the Director of Information Security Services at Integral Partners, Kayne McGladrey, told the Cyber Security Hub that, “If you’re breached by a third party, nobody cares that it’s the third party’s fault. It comes back to you.”

He continued: “It’s your fault for not having adequate controls. And the single easiest third-party control is around onboarding and off-boarding third-party accounts.”

Even if you’re rotating passwords, monitoring privileged access, auditing, etc., McGladrey said you must know, empirically, who’s accessing your network.

"Patching is a reactive strategy, and there are a couple of challenges that have led us to the current situation. One of those challenges is that the market has rewarded companies that develop and produce products rapidly, and the market has shown a willingness to accept post-release patching as an acceptable trade-off. As a result, developers and architects are rewarded by their employers for producing code and architecture very quickly with less thought given to cybersecurity.

"The other significant challenge is that the cybersecurity community is generally homogenous. We have a diversity problem when just 11% of women work in cybersecurity. This lack of diversity in backgrounds and life experiences has influenced the analytic methodologies that are used to evaluate potential security issues with products. This lack of diversity of thought has led to the unfortunate set of expectations that breaches are inevitable, and this situation will continue until the cybersecurity industry does a better job of including diverse voices and opinions in the global conversation about security."

Include Cybersecurity

With between 1.8 and 5.5 million cybersecurity jobs that are likely to go unfilled by 2021, the cybersecurity industry needs to encourage people who have not previously considered these jobs to include cybersecurity in their job options. The world does not need another whitepaper about the lack of diversity of race, gender, and orientation in cybersecurity.

“Organizations should focus on defining a least-privilege security model for each permanent or temporary role a user may inhabit, and then apply those roles to every device, server, and service that an individual may interact with over the course of each day,” says Kayne McGladrey (@kaynemcgladrey), Director of Information Security Services at Integral Partners.

“Organizations need to move past the quaint but antiquated concept of a network perimeter and recognize that the only measurable unit of security is the individual. Individuals include employees, project team members, contractors, third-party service providers, customers, prospects, and guests at a minimum. “

Four Critical Cybersecurity Predictions for 2018

One fact will hold true in 2018, no matter what organizations do: cybercriminals will continue to reinvest their profits into building sustainable but illegal businesses. The underlying economics of cybercrime continue to give massive financial incentives to the attackers. Organizations should retaliate by adopting a “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality so that they’re always slightly more secure than organizations in the same market or vertical.

Three cybersecurity predictions for 2018, according to Twitter

On December 12th, I moderated the #securityinsiderchat on Twitter, where more than twenty cybersecurity experts gathered to discuss their predictions for 2018. It’s always a pleasure and a privilege to learn from a diverse gathering of people and to read their ideas over the course of nearly 300 tweets. Plus, it’s an excellent opportunity to post animated cat gifs in the context of work.