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A Quiet Introspection on the Inevitable Security Apocalypse

By Christopher Kusek, Contributor

I came across this video the other day and it reminded me of what we’re really doing in IT day in and day out, year after year.

For those of you, like me, who have been working in security or IT over the past 30 years, you may have noticed a trend when it comes to how we do things today. You may hear things like, “Wow, things are hard to keep up with, they’re constantly changing!” or “The whole IT landscape is hard to keep updated because every day there is a new threat!” What’s great about taking this level of introspection on the evolution of security is that we truly have seen an actual evolution in security!

If you remember in my last post, “Wireless Overlap a thing of the Past with Aruba?” I talked about unsupervised and supervised machine learning model types. We all know that for the better part of our lives, our interactions with security and general IT events have all been largely supervised events. “[Looks at logs] ‘What website did you visit?’ [looks at logs again].” Or, “[Virus Alert shows up] ‘Hey, I think you downloaded some malware’ [Dispatch someone to look at machine, run AV tools, rebuild, rinse, repeat].” And so on and so forth! Feel free to supply the number of five-minute problems that took hours and hours to identify, fix and resolve, and possibly identify so many other problems you didn’t even know about that have laid dormant or even active.

Take Action with Automation
One of the things that I really like about Aruba IntroSpect is the actionable nature of it. See the cool little flow-chart-picture below. Amazing, right?

It’s such a foreign concept to us at times to have any kind of automation in the kill chain when a problem surfaces itself. This is something we’re all too familiar with in other parts of the network, right? Spanning tree or edge loop detection: “Loop detected, kill cause of loop”, or “Virus found on machine or email, kill file.” Even very rudimentary things that we all take for granted like, “Password expired/locked out from too many tries” so the account is literally locked out until a user or admin action is taken.

To say the future is here would be an understatement, but the present is most definitely futuristic. Unless we all take a step back and have a personal and quiet introspection on the current state of IT security, we could have an apocalypse on our hands because we as humans can only do so much to keep up with the machines and their nefarious actions.

Be Passionate About Security
Hopefully you enjoyed this, and preferably, you learned something. I really enjoyed sharing this brief perspective on the landscape and the growth the security industry has had in the past few years alone. I’ve only just scratched the surface of the capabilities available in the industry to address these very looming threats on the horizon.

This topic is a very personal and passionate one for me so if you would like to know more about what inspired this, a few of my favorite sources, materials and videos on Aruba IntroSpect are below for your learning pleasure:

Brief: Aruba IntroSpect User and Entity Behavior Analytics

Tech Field Day Video: Aruba Beyond the Hype of Machine Learning

Tech Field Day Video: Aruba IntroSpect and Demonstration with Larry Lunetta and Viswesh Ananthakrishnan