Flying Blind Into the Threat Visibility Gap

Data, data everywhere and yet there’s very little insight to inform the business on the true nature and severity of cyber threats. That’s the story at most organizations where traditional Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) fail to bring into focus the visibility into the mounting expanse of security data.

The result: companies are flying blind, blocking valid users, and losing money while opening the door to threats that can shutter the business. This visibility gap not only affects security, but also the broader business decisions that companies must make to compete in the Digital Transformation (DX). 

But there are a few ways that the enterprise can bridge the gap:

1. Simplifying business processes through automation
2. Relying on systems they can trust and don’t have to update
3. Using managed services that oversee the solution and their security data for them

Simplify business processes through automation and tool reduction 

Complex security confounds business processes. Organizations flounder in a sea of security tools and the manual steps that they must take to manage them. The more the tools, the more the alerts. After enough time spent tracking down the source of the alarms (mostly false positives), security teams begin to ignore both the tools and the warnings.

As a result, the tools become dead weight – wasted computing footprint without providing any security, ROI, or peace of mind. Worse, threats that pass-through web applications and APIs create financial losses, rob the business of consumer data and intellectual property, and impede business continuity, stability, innovation, and growth.

MicroMarketMonitor, the market research firm with the world’s first real-time market intelligence, expects the security analytics market to grow significantly in the North American region due to the increasing number of security breaches, continued line of sophisticated attacks, and the existence of obsolete cyber defense systems in organizations, according to its recent report.

Enterprises are hungry for tools that can analyze their security data effectively and provide actionable insights. These businesses need an automated, centralized solution to collect security data comprehensively, analyze the risk factors, and assign risk scores from multiple factors. Such a solution can replace ineffective tools and manual steps for simplified business processes.

By mitigating threats to web apps and APIs, this solution can free up teams to focus on higher level tasks in support of the growing business. As a result, the business can innovate and compete with confidence, having addressed the security issues that discourage consumers, customers, and partners. 

Trade constant updates for security you can trust

Legacy WAFs distract and tie up security teams with constant updates, including:

• Software patches
• Threat intelligence
• Threat detection rules
• Static signatures

Most security pros lack the web application skills necessary to add threat detection rules to a traditional WAF. If skills aren’t the issue, it’s time.

Companies need a solution they can trust that replaces static signatures, which can’t detect zero-day attacks, or repackaged malware with machine learning that just works. Machine learning trains on patterns of malicious behavior and applies a feedback loop to ensure accuracy when recognizing those patterns. The process is significantly more reliable than rules and signatures. And it’s genuine machine learning, not the advanced statistical modeling that many vendors are calling “machine learning”.

Such a solution should:

1. Ingest security data from application profiles, threat characteristics, threat intensity analysis, and threat intelligence as well as machine learning.
2. Feed that data into a risk engine, which scores the risks based on multiple risk factors.
3. Alert security teams on risks that have a high confidence level.

Empower a managed service to provide the next-gen WAF

ThreatX is the behavior-based, attacker-centric next-gen web application security solution, cradled by a managed service. ThreatX funnels security data from various sources into its intelligent Risk Engine, which pinpoints threats early in the kill chain based on a keen assessment of the accumulated risk factors.

ThreatX analyzes countless security events to uncover trends in threat behaviors, explore root cause analysis, and produce predictive models that forecast up and coming threat behaviors. ThreatX does the heavy lifting of detecting and nixing threats, and its Security Operations Center shoulders the operational burden and upkeep, which successfully keeps companies out of the WAF maintenance business and focused on their core initiatives.

Look into ThreatX, a CIO Applications Top 25 Cybersecurity Company for 2019, and the behavior-based solution to address: 

• Detection of and protection against malicious bots
• The scale, speed, and security of APIs
• The volume of automated threats and subsequent alerts
• The limitations of legacy security systems