Whitepaper: Actionable Anomalies - How MixMode AI Makes Your Security Data Smarter

Russell Gray Vice President of Product Development

Russell Gray is technology leader with over 15 years experience in technical product management & client success. A former litigation attorney, Russell brings his research, analytical and communication skills to bear in his role as Vice President of Product Development for MixMode.

In today’s ever evolving cybersecurity landscape there are major problems facing professionals that continue to worsen. These problems center around a shortage of tools advanced enough to understand the baseline of a network in order to pinpoint anomalies and a massive information overload problem in the form of security alerts.

In a recent report by the SANS institute, a study showed that for most security teams the number one barrier to the detection of advanced threats and the ability to respond was a lack of understanding of “normal behavior” or a baseline of what is normal behavior on the network.

This is due not only to a lack of tools with the advanced capability to provide this baseline, but also, according to the same SANS study, “a lack of data integration between current security analytics tools and cloud infrastructure.”

Unfortunately, traditional security tools are time consuming, if not impossible, to tune for alert accuracy. This creates an ever-increasing problem of having too many alerts for your under-resourced security teams to investigate. In fact, for companies over 500 employees, enterprise security teams have six, or more, different security systems generating over 3,400 security alerts a day.

Given the volume of security noise, and the lack of human resources, it is not surprising that 32% of security professionals admit to ignoring alerts. A dangerous trend that is born out of sheer necessity. The trending in cybersecurity further supports this assessment. When reviewing the rate at which the annual spend in cybersecurity increases each year, one would expect the rate and severity of breaches to be shrinking or at least holding steady, however, this is not the case.

In 2019 the number of cybersecurity breaches increased by 17% (MarketWatch). Put more plainly the cybersecurity industry now seems to be meeting Einstein’s definition of insanity, “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The volume of alerts proliferated by unactionable data is at the root of this problem.

Continue reading our latest whitepaper, “Actionable Anomalies – How MixMode AI Makes Your Security Data Smarter,” to learn: