Cyber attacks, when I was growing up they sounded like the plot of a futuristic science fiction film but today they’re one of the biggest concerns for companies and consumers alike. Even governments aren’t immune, massive hacks have been carried out, revealing sensitive government security and political information. Hacks have even been responsible for hundreds of breaches that have exposed everything from our Facebook activity to our debit card PINs and even our address and passwords.
It seems these days even the biggest and most secure companies, startups and governments aren’t immune to cyber attacks. While this can be just an annoyance for some users, hacks have serious consequences. A massive data breach of credit union Equifax last year exposed the Social Security Numbers of millions of Americans and left them open for fraud. Across the pond, in the United Kingdom, a ransomware attack on various hospitals shut down almost 20 of them and made them unable to access patient medical data.
Cyber attacks and breaches have soared recently and security budgets have grown in response. Until now it has been necessary to juggle a multitude of expensive tools from multiple vendors. The industry doesn’t need another point solution to cobble together. It needs a scalable, intelligent central platform, that is fed with pervasive data collection and visibility and armed with advanced artificial intelligence.
In response to more frequent and escalating cyber attacks, many companies and governments have begun to hire outside data security services and install sophisticated software. Today my article will be about the AI-driven data protection startup Aella Data. Aella Data provides preventative data breach detection to detect breaches anywhere they occur through the use of artificial intelligence.
Their goal is to detect and neutralize breach threats before they result in a loss of information. According to their data about 2,000 daily security events occur, taking about 200 days to detect and costing companies approximately $6 billion altogether. Their plan to protect against these breaches is their advanced AI, Aella which acts as a Virtual Security Analysis Assistant.
Aella provides Preventative Breach Detection by using what they call Distributed Security Intelligence. In this way organizations can proactively detect and defend against attacks on their data systems, ideally before any sort of damage is done. Preventative measures are obviously the best plan of attack for companies who need to keep or bring their number of data breaches to zero but a potential also exists for false alarms.
Preventing false alarms is where Aella really comes to shine. Aella intelligently makes determinations of which alarms are a threat to a user’s data system. This is achieved through multiple machine learning techniques and it ensures that responses are quick, accurate and successful. With faster and more accurate detection, breaches or attacks can be caught in a matter of minutes, as opposed to months. So far with Aella, Aella Data has lowered the amount of average cyber breaches to 20 daily high fidelity alerts, which took approximately 10 minutes to detect and cost $200 in detection costs.
Today’s environments consist of physical, virtualized, containerized, public, private, and hybrid clouds. This creates visibility challenges and an unmanageable amount of alert noise. In this state, it is extremely difficult to identify the critical threats and respond to the right ones before data is stolen or other damage is done.
Aella is pretty impressive but Aella Data offers another breach detection system. It’s called Starlight. Starlight provides preventative breach detection which can be used to detect security threats across hundreds of thousands of systems and best of all Aella Data promises no blindspots. Like Aella, this means that detection takes minutes rather than months and that the number of alerts is significantly reduced once false alerts are sifted through. Since the detection systems are fully anonymous human error is taken out of the equation and no one has to be paid just to sit and monitor thousands or hundreds of security alerts.
Cyber attacks may be a part of our everyday lives but data breaches don’t have to be. The solution to tomorrow’s breach or attack may not be working harder and increasing man (or woman) power but, rather working smarter by employing the AI-driven solutions at the disposal of large companies or even the government. Aella Data presents a clear vision of what that future could look like.
aelladata.com
