They're Fast. We're Faster

For the past few years, I’ve been living and working in proximity to the latest developments in cybersecurity. My mom teaches cybersecurity at UTSA and a lot of my data science coverage involves experts in the field mitigating risk from bad actors.

While live tweeting for DM Radio’s webinar with thatDot Streaming Graph, I’ve realized that many hostile presences in our ecosystems are in fact Advanced Persistent Threats. They’re highly funded, knowledgeable and of course, extremely difficult to detect. According to Ryan Wright, thatDot’s Founder and CEO, “an attacker’s main objective is to gain access [to your system] and their favorite way to do that is to steal the credentials of someone who is authorized.”

If these quote on quote cyberdemons have the ability to impersonate us within our own systems, what chance do we have of stopping them? The truth is: a lot. No matter how trained a hostile presence is, if it doesn’t belong in our systems, it will inevitably break pattern. Graph technology has always been skilled at identifying patterns and their respective outliers. The problem is, it hasn’t been fast enough to detect threats in real-time.

Now, however, with streaming graph as a solution, we can automatically screen for cracks in our walls and even get ahead of future invasions by supplying our systems with vast, high-quality data. As we input more and more data into our systems, we continuously simulate the entrance of foreign presences into our environments. Automatically, even without human involvement, our systems become better and better at navigating our own patterns and reacting to inputs that break them. “The nodes in a graph are triggered by events,” explained Wright. “We only do work when work needs to be done.”

Most of what we can do to protect our systems is to spend the time understanding them - assessing each chamber of our environments as thoroughly or more so than any potential invader. Wright presented this strategy as somewhat of a walk-through, getting “to the top of the pyramid by walking through with precision and accuracy.” Having an intimate knowledge of our own spaces gives us an inherent advantage over anyone attempting to gain their bearings for the first time, whatever their motives might be. When a threat is identified in real-time, a systematic retracing of one’s steps from the top of the pyramid may just be enough to combat the issue.