The Writing on the Wall, Feeling secure

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Blogpost by Frank van der Wal | Within a couple of weeks, we will wish our beloved ones and friends all the best for the new year. This is that time of the year that we feel close to our beloved ones and family. The darkest days of the year (if you are living on the Northern Hemisphere, that is). With the weather we had in the Netherlands the last couple of days, the shimmer wasn’t cleared away at all. We would like to stay indoors, nicely tucked away near the Christmas tree, the fireplace lit up and enjoy the safety of our homes. We feel… err … secure.

Well, now that I mentioned it… how about that security? From an IT perspective, that is?

Everybody that is working in IT ‘knows’ something about security. Not in-depth, mind you! What the general audience ‘knows’ is that security is darn complex and that you need an expert to help you solve, plan, architect, implement and test your IT Security. That might not be very different from other IT domains, but it is very difficult to find good security skills. They are scarce. And, unlike other IT domains, you basically can’t wait to strengthen your IT security. Your organisation is probably attacked daily. If you’re thinking it is not, think again.

A very skilled IT security analyst can investigate about 20 security incidents (tops) on a daily basis. The reason is that most of the data available on the incidents is of an unstructured nature that can’t be accessed quickly. The IT security analyst would probably look into different systems to correlate incidents. In new type of threats, the security analyst needs time to gather information about this new threat, look into blogs, read articles about it and time to discuss. In the meantime other threats are coming in…

Like in many similar situations, to understand text reports in PDF’s, blogs, wikis you need humans, not computers. But humans can only read so much information. In a recent presentation I heard a colleague say that a medical doctor needs 160 hours of reading every week to keep up with the official and renowned publications in the medical field. That’s simply impossible and even if the doctor could do that, it was worthless for he doesn’t have time to see a patient anymore, so why bother.

If there’s one thing that stood out in 2016 it was the rise of Cognitive computing. When I revered that you need humans to plough through the many lines of text in PDF’s, blogs and the like, I meant: you need cognitive capabilities. And when IBM talks Cognitive we mean the capabilities we build around the Watson system that once won Jeopardy. Even then we proved that the system was able to read thousands of pages of unstructured text and make sense of it and come with amazing answers.

IBM has learned Watson to become a registered oncologist, to name one of his capabilities. We have now announced that we will use it’s cognitive powers to help beat cyber attacks by assisting the security analyst mentioned earlier in this article. The IBM Watson for Cyber Security can easily read the blogs and articles and correlates that with in-house data (structured and unstructured) and come up with valuable information about the threats.

It is impressive to see how fast Watson (only 5 years of age) has learned and the many disciplines it now masters. For me, to see Watson help fight Cyber Crime, is a very good and relaxing thought and I will relish under my Christmas tree.

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Have a wonderful Christmas, see you back in 2017!  Enjoy — and keep secure!