Art Coviello, Executive Vice President of EMC and Executive Chairman of RSA, The Security Division of EMC (NYSE: EMC), called on the industry to rethink traditional methods of security – imploring security leaders, vendors and practitioners to rapidly advance security strategies beyond signature and perimeter-based defenses and to work together to develop and adopt new intelligence-based approaches to information security.
Coviello noted that up until recently, IT security has succeeded in making the internet safe enough to transform the world, but times are changing, and trust in the digital world is in jeopardy.
“New breeds of cybercriminals, hacktivists, and rogue nation states have become as adept at exploiting the vulnerabilities of our digital world as our customers have become at exploiting its value,” said Coviello. “With increased speed, agility and cunning, attackers are taking advantage of gaps in security resulting from the openness of today’s hyperconnected infrastructures and the industry’s slow response to recognize the potency of the emerging threat landscape.”
Coviello remarked that security systems must evolve from the current patchwork of controls serving up too much data and not enough intelligence to models that provide advanced monitoring capabilities, high-speed analytics and intelligent controls.
Coviello called for the industry to rally together to take the following actions:
- Change how we think about security. The security industry must stop thinking linearly, “…blindly adding new controls on top of failed models. We need to recognize, once and for all, that perimeter-based defenses and signature-based technologies are past their freshness dates, and acknowledge that our networks will be penetrated. We should no longer be surprised by this,” Coviello said.
- Transition to intelligence-driven security systems that are risk-based, agile, and contextual. Organizations must do a better job at evaluating risk from the inside out and the outside in – combining both broad and deep understanding of their material assets and internal environments with a wide range of external intelligence sources. Security frameworks must be based upon agile, predictive analytics and continuous monitoring. Finally, organizations need to develop systems that provide real-time access to the entirety of relevant information via advanced, Big Data-based security systems driven by the power of multi-source intelligence in order to achieve a contextual understanding of threats.
- Collaborate and Share information. The IT industry must do a better job of sharing its collective intelligence in real time “for the benefit of all,” Coviello said. This is already beginning to happen, as grassroots networks of likeminded communities are sharing security intelligence as never before.
- Train a new generation of security analyst to combat the rising tide of Advanced Attacks. The new breed of analyst must have analytical and intelligence skills, ‘big picture’ thinking, people skills, a focus on offense (not just defense), and the ability to react with speed and precision.
