Photo: Courtesy IBM
IBM Security (NYSE: IBM) today announced the availability of Watson for Cyber Security, the industry’s first augmented intelligence technology designed to power cognitive security operations centers (SOCs). Over the past year, Watson has been trained on the language of cybersecurity, ingesting over 1 million security documents. Watson can now help security analysts parse thousands of natural language research reports that have never before been accessible to modern security tools.
According to IBM research, security teams sift through more than 200,000 security events per day on average, leading to over 20,000 hours per year wasted chasing false positives. The need to introduce cognitive technologies into security operations centers will be critical to keep up with the anticipated doubling of security incidents over the next five years and increased regulation globally.
Watson for Cyber Security will be integrated into IBM’s new Cognitive SOC platform, bringing together advanced cognitive technologies with security operations and providing the ability to respond to threats across endpoint, network, users and cloud. The centerpiece of this platform is IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson, a new app available in the IBM Security App Exchange, which is the first tool that taps into Watson’s corpus of cybersecurity insights. This new app is already being used by Avnet, University of New Brunswick, Sopra Steria and 40 other customers globally to augment security analysts’ investigations into security incidents.
With the dramatic growth in security events, IBM has also invested in research to bring cognitive tools into its global X-Force Command Center network, including a Watson-powered chatbot currently being used to interact with IBM Managed Security Services customers. IBM also revealed a new research project, code-named Havyn, pioneering a voice-powered security assistant that leverages Watson conversation technology to respond to verbal commands and natural language from security analysts.
“Today’s sophisticated cybersecurity threats attack on multiple fronts to conceal their activities, and our security analysts face the difficult task of pinpointing these attacks amongst a massive sea of security-related data,” said Sean Valcamp, Chief Information Security Officer at Avnet. “Watson makes concealment efforts more difficult by quickly analyzing multiple streams of data and comparing it with the latest security attack intelligence to provide a more complete picture of the threat. Watson also generates reports on these threats in a matter of minutes, which greatly speeds the time between detecting a potential event and my security team’s ability to respond accordingly.”
Source: IBM Newsroom