Recap: The MPOWER Cybersecurity Summit

A couple weeks ago, we attended McAfee’s MPOWER cybersecurity summit in Las Vegas. With a stellar line-up of speakers and announcements, we thought we’d recap the highlights of the event.

Day 1: Changing the Signal-to-Noise Ratio With McAfee Behavioral Analytics
The keynote opened with threats at the top of our minds: crimeware, cyber espionage, denial of service, insider and privilege issues, miscellaneous errors, payment-card skimming, POS intrusion, physical theft and loss, web-application attacks, everything else. In the visual, “everything else” appeared as one solitary block off to the right side of the screen. Yet in today’s cybersecurity, this is a practical reality that is far more pervasive that it appears in the diagram.  

McAfee went on to describe how cybersecurity has changed. We agree. Yesterday’s defense strategy was based on prevention. Today’s cybersecurity attacks are much sophisticated and sometimes even subtle, such as APTs. Attackers have learned to bypass or distract existing security systems. Signs of a threat either sit below thresholds to evade detection from existing rules-based systems, or there are simply too many signs of possible threats for security teams to make sense of them all.

To turn the tables in favor of the good guys, McAfee’s announcement on changing the ratio of signal-to-noise with human-machine teaming was very exciting for us! 

Day 2: “Assume you are already breached”
On day 2, we completely agreed with Brian Krebs‘ advice. He said enterprises should assume they are already breached. He shared that too many of these organizations just don’t want to know, and likened their security awareness to that of Neo in The Matrix taking the red pill versus the blue pill.”

Brian recommended that enterprises create a baseline for what employees are doing, so they can find meaningful deviations. Now, this doesn’t mean you are spying on your employees. It means you are ensuring—just like a doctor or a parent—that the users and entities in your care are behaving normally, and understanding when they are not. 

Also during the event, we showcased our advanced analytics and machine learning for cybersecurity at Atos’ booth. To learn more about how Atos and Interset work together, refer to the press release (“Interset Security Analytics Enhances Atos Prescriptive Security Offering”).

In the end, our machine-learning architecture is a hit with both prospects and internal employees alike! If you’re interested in joining our team, contact us.