Let us paint a picture. In 2012 alone, the Internet Crime Complaint Center received close to 290,000 complaints. Nearly 115,000 of the complainants reported losses aggregating around $525.4 million. According to the report, most of those who reported a loss lost around $600. But to be clearer, the average loss amounted to nearly $4,600, which only means that there were people who lost a lot of money. These statistics could easily be higher as there are people who are either not aware that they have been attacked or do not report such attacks.
The good news is that there is now a new way to fight cybercrime: big data.
Marketers and business owners have long relied on big data to learn more about their customers and competitors by tapping into the large amount of data they already have and analyzing it. IT security experts have taken notice of big data and how it could help fight cybercrime. Here are some examples of current real world scenarios of how big data is being used to fight cybercriminals:
Combatting malware by detecting patterns.
Malware often behave in a certain way, which is why it would be easy to detect malware if you know what you are looking for. You can use big data analysis to detect these patterns and stop the malware and remove it from your system. A good example of this application comes from Google. When you search for something and you click on a link leading to a site that is infected with malware, it will notify you that the site is compromised, or it might tell you that your computer is already infected with software that goes between your connection to other sites.
Fortifying your Web application firewalls.
If you use a Web application firewall to protect your apps, you can crowdsource the gathering of threat information. In crowdsourcing you can use big data to get information from the “crowd” about various threats. This way, your firewalls are updated and you keep out even the latest threats. This is what Imperva Incapsula is doing and they are able to protect their customers from even emerging threats and the top 10 threats identified by Open Web Application Security Project.
Assigning reputation scores to various IP addresses or Web sites.
You can use big data analysis to monitor potential malicious activity from a large number of IP addresses and assign reputation scores to these IP addresses. This will help you combat botnet activity.
Let Big Data Work for You
The beauty of big data analysis is that you have a lot of data to work with and you could effectively pinpoint anomalous patterns in your network activity better than the old defenses can. Analytics software, in short, could tell you if there are changes to your network’s activity and traffic that would suggest malware and other threats.
Not only that, big data analytics can also help you determine the weakest point in your network where you are most vulnerable. You could then proactively plug any security holes.
If you are ready to employ big data in your security and network defenses, then you should contact Four Cornerstone to find out which Oracle products, software and adapters you need. We offer comprehensive Oracle solutions, such as remote DBA support, database performance tuning, data warehousing and MySQL support.
Photo by ladislau.girona.
