Christian Wiens

Christian Wiens is Director of Marketing at MixMode. He has 10+ years of experience as a cybersecurity professional. He has his BA from The University of California, Berkeley and resides in Austin, TX.

Featured Use Case: Why a Large US Utility Company Turned to MixMode to Address Utility Grid Vulnerabilities

A large utility company approached MixMode with the following scenario: The enterprise SOC was utilizing a shared SIEM application that was being utilized by several stakeholders: the networking team, the SCADA team, the dev-ops team, the compliance team and cybersecurity teams for “basic search and investigation of log files to meet regulatory compliance requirements”.

Recent Ransomware Attacks on U.S. Hospitals Highlight the Inefficiency of Rules-Based Cybersecurity Solutions

A number of recent high profile ransomware attacks on U.S. hospitals have demonstrated the urgency for organizations, municipalities, and critical services to take a proactive approach to protecting networks with a predictive AI solution.

How Vendors Capitalize on SIEM’s Fundamental Flaws

Because the fundamental nature of SIEM requires infinite amounts of data, security teams are forced to constantly wrangle their network data and faced with an unmanageable number of false positive alerts. This means they have to devise efficient ways to collect, organize and store data, resulting in an incredible investment in human and financial resources.

Improving on the Typical SIEM Model

Despite its inherent flaws, today’s SIEM software solutions still shine when it comes to searching and investigating log data. One effective, comprehensive approach to network security pairs the best parts of SIEM with modern, AI-driven predictive analysis tools. Alternatively, organizations can replace their outdated SIEM with a modern single platform self-learning AI solution.

The Evolution of SIEM

It should be noted that SIEM platforms are exceptionally effective at what they initially were intended for: providing enterprise teams with a central repository of log information that would allow them to conduct search and investigation activities against machine-generated data. If this was all an enterprise cybersecurity team needed in 2020 to thwart attacks and stop bad actors from infiltrating their systems, SIEM would truly be the cybersecurity silver bullet that it claims to be.

How Data Normalization in Cybersecurity Impacts Regulatory Compliance

Complying with privacy regulations requires all organizations to have access to data on demand, wherever it lives on a network. With the unfathomable amount of data managed by most organizations operating in the finance space today, it can become a significant challenge to locate specific data across legacy systems and networks with countless connections online and off.

Data Overload Problem: Data Normalization Strategies Are Expensive

Financial institutions spend five to ten million dollars each year managing data. A recent Computer Services Inc (CSI) study reveals that most banks expect to spend up to 40 percent of their budgets on regulatory compliance cybersecurity, often adopting expensive data normalization strategies.

Why a Platform With a Generative Baseline Matters

MixMode creates a generative baseline. Unlike the historically-based baselines provided by add-on NTA solutions, a generative baseline is predictive, real-time, and accurate. MixMode provides anomaly detection and behavioral analytics and the ability to suppress false positives and surface true positives.

NTA and NDR: The Missing Piece

Most SIEM vendors acknowledge the value of network traffic data for leading indicators of attacks, anomaly detection, and user behavior analysis as being far more useful than log data. Ironically, network traffic data is often expressly excluded from SIEM deployments, because the data ingest significantly increases the required data aggregation and storage costs typically 3-5x.