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AI and machine learning offer tremendous promise for humanity in terms of helping us make sense of Big Data. But, while the processing power of these tools is integral for understanding trends and predicting threats, it’s not sufficient on its own.

Thoughtful design of threat intelligence—design that accounts for the ultimate needs of its consumers—is essential too. There are three areas where thoughtful design of AI for cybersecurity increases overall utility for its end users.

Designing where your data comes from

To set the process of machine learning in motion, data scientists rely on robust data sets they can use to train models that deduce patterns. If your data is siloed, it relies on a single community of endpoints or is made up only of data gathered from sensors like honeypots and crawlers. There are bound to be gaps in the resultant threat intelligence.

A diverse set of real-world endpoints is essential to achieve actionable threat intelligence. For one thing, machine learning models can be prone to picking up biases if exposed to either too much of a particular threat or too narrow of a user base. That may make the model adept at discovering one type of threat, but not so great at noticing others. Well-rounded, globally-sourced data provides the most accurate picture of threat trends.

Another significant reason real-world endpoints are essential is that some malware excels at evading traditional crawling mechanisms. This is especially common for phishing sites targeting specific geos or user environments, as well as for malware executables. Phishing sites can hide their malicious content from crawlers, and malware can appear benign or sit on a user’s endpoint for extended periods of time without taking an action.

Designing how to illustrate data’s context

Historical trends help to gauge future measurements, so designing threat intelligence that accounts for context is essential. Take a major website like www.google.com for example. Historical threat intelligence signals it’s been benign for years, leading to the conclusion that its owners have put solid security practices in place and are committed to not letting it become a vector for bad actors. On the other hand, if we look at a domain that was only very recently registered or has a long history of presenting a threat, there’s a greater chance it will behave negatively in the future. 

Illustrating this type of information in a useful way can take the form of a reputation score. Since predictions about a data object’s future actions—whether it be a URL, file, or mobile app—are based on probability, reputation scores can help determine the probability that an object may become a future threat, helping organizations determine the level of risk they are comfortable with and set their policies accordingly.

For more information on why context is critical to actionable threat intelligence, click here.

Designing how you classify and apply the data

Finally, how a threat intelligence provider classifies data and the options they offer partners and users in terms of how to apply it can greatly increase its utility. Protecting networks, homes, and devices from internet threats is one thing, and certainly desirable for any threat intelligence feed, but that’s far from all it can do.

Technology vendors designing a parental control product, for instance, need threat intelligence capable of classifying content based on its appropriateness for children. And any parent knows malware isn’t the only thing children should be shielded from. Categories like adult content, gambling sites, or hubs for pirating legitimate media may also be worthy of avoiding. This flexibility extends to the workplace, too, where peer-to-peer streaming and social media sites can affect worker productivity and slow network speeds, not to mention introduce regulatory compliance concerns. Being able to classify internet object with such scalpel-like precision makes thoughtfully designed threat intelligence that is much more useful for the partners leveraging it.

Finally, the speed at which new threat intelligence findings are applied to all endpoints on a device is critical. It’s well-known that static threat lists can’t keep up with the pace of today’s malware, but updating those lists on a daily basis isn’t cutting it anymore either. The time from initial detection to global protection must be a matter of minutes.

This brings us back to where we started: the need for a robust, geographically diverse data set from which to draw our threat intelligence. For more information on how the Webroot Platform draws its data to protect customers and vendor partners around the globe, visit our threat intelligence page.

The post Thoughtful Design in the Age of Cybersecurity AI appeared first on Webroot Blog.

1949, 1971, 1979, 1981, 1983 and 1991.

Yes, these are numbers. You more than likely even recognize them as years. However, without context you wouldn’t immediately recognize them as years in which Sicily’s Mount Etna experienced major eruptions.

Data matters, but only if it’s paired with enough context to create meaning.

While today’s conversations about threat intelligence tend to throw a ton of impressive numbers and fancy stats out there, if the discussion isn’t informed by context, numbers become noise. Context is how Webroot takes the wealth of information it gathers—data from more than 67 million sources including crawlers, honeypots, as well as partner and customer endpoints—and turns it into actionable, contextual threat intelligence.

What defines contextual threat intelligence?

When determining a definition of contextual threat intelligence, it can be helpful to focus on what it is not. It’s not a simple list of threats that’s refreshed periodically. A list of known phishing sites may be updated daily or weekly, but given that we know the average lifespan of an in-use phishing site to be mere hours, there’s no guarantee such lists are up to date.

“Some threat intelligence providers pursue the low-hanging fruit of threat intelligence—the cheap and easy kind,” says Webroot Sr. Product Marketing Manager Holly Spiers. “They provide a list of of IP addresses that have been deemed threats, but there’s no context as to why or when they were deemed a threat. You’re not getting the full story.”

Contextual threat intelligence is that full story. It provides not only a constantly updated feed of known threats, but also historical data and relationships between data objects for a fuller picture of the history of a threat based on the “internet neighborhood” in which it’s active.

Unfortunately, historical relationships are another aspect often missing from low-hanging threat intelligence sources. Since threat actors are constantly trying to evade detection, they may use a malicious URL for a period before letting it go dormant while its reputation cools down. But because it takes more effort to start from scratch, it’s likely the actor will return to it before too long.

“Our Threat Investigator tool, a visualization demo that illustrates the relationship between data objects, is able to show how an IP address’s status can change over a period of time, says Spiers. “Within six months, it may show signs of being a threat, and then go benign.”

What are the elements of context?

Over the course of a year, millions of internet objects change state from benign to malicious and back numerous times as cyber criminals attempt to avoid detection. And because threats are often interconnected, being able to map their relationships allows us to better predict whether a benign object has the potential to turn malicious. It also helps us protect users from never-before-seen threats and even predict where future attacks may come from.

That’s where the power in prediction lies—in having contextual and historical data instead of looking at a static point in time.

Some elements that are needed to provide a deeper understanding of an interwoven landscape include:

• Real-time data from real-world sources, supplemented by active web crawlers and passive sensor networks of honeypots designed to attract threats, provide the necessary data for training machine learning models to spot threats
• An ability to analyze relationships connecting data objects allows threat intelligence providers to make a connections as to how a benign IP address, for example, may be only one step away from a malicious URL and to predict with high confidence whether the IP address will turn malicious in the future.
• Both live and historical data helps in the development of a trusted reputation score based on behavior over time and common reputational influencers such as age, popularity, and past infections.

Seeing the signal through the noise

Context is the way to turn terabytes of data into something meaningful that prompts action. Having the power to be able to dig into the relationships of internet objects provides the context that matters to technology vendors. For consumers of contextual threat intelligence, it means fewer false positives and the ability to prioritize real threats.

“Working with real-world vendors is key,” according to Spiers. “The reach of contextual threat intelligence and number of individuals it touches can grow exponentially.”

Interested in learning more about contextual threat intelligence? Read about the importance of data quality for a threat intelligence platform in our latest issue of Quarterly Threat Trends.

The post Context Matters: Turning Data into Threat Intelligence appeared first on Webroot Blog.