Traditional vs. Automated MSSP utilizing ML and AI

Cybercriminals are leveraging innovative technology, such as customized malware that can evade and bypass many of the traditional endpoint security solutions, so it’s imperative that firms take a more proactive approach: next-gen Security Operations Center (SOC) for real-time visibility, monitoring, detection and advanced threat analysis in combination with incident response services. Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), a strategy for incident response, can strengthen your security posture by combining enhanced visibility with pinpoint threat detection and response across all endpoints. However, because building your own EDR is costly and requires a fairly large team to manage, most firms use Managed Security Services Providers (MSSPs).

As we continue to see in the industry, there is no cyber “silver bullet”; no single protection solution is infallible, no matter how advanced. The prevailing approach to cybersecurity protection to address this problem is strong but flawed; various protections, such as IDS, NGFW, Email, Endpoint Security, etc., deployed in-depth. These solutions are designed by different manufacturers and therefore not built to communicate with each other inherently; so recommended multi-layered approaches are rendered ineffective without proper integration between security solutions. Blind spots are therefore created in your cyber framework as the information is fragmented, making firms vulnerable to substantial breaches. Further exacerbating the problem is that most use the traditional, rule-based SIEM correlation to combat the ever-evolving cyber threats.

 Many organizations lack established organizational knowledge of detection and response strategies in security because preventive approaches were the most common tactics for decades. Skill sets are scarce and, therefore, remain at a premium, leading organizations to seek external help from security consultants, managed security service providers (MSSPs) and outsourcers.

Gartner Research, March 2017

So how do firm stay protected?

Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services emerged in the security market to address the detection and response bandwidth problem. Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) play a major role in cybersecurity by automating human intensive tasks and providing real-time alerting and remediation. By deploying security solutions that make use of ML and AI, automated managed security is able to provide a comprehensive EDR plan that assesses real-time contextual data to help identify what is wrong, why it is wrong, and how to rectify it. The combination of ML and AI can correlate all factual data into context to determine if a threat is crucial or not, in addition to advanced behavioral analytics to qualify threat indicators to determine if it’s actual threats or false positive, is a proactive approach to identifying both known and unknown threats and allowing for automated remediation.