Big Data / Data and Analytics / Data Visualization

Help Mitigate Cybersecurity Threats with Data Visualization

Cybersecurity and its uses in data visualization

What do the U.S. Department of Justice, Snapchat, Wendy’s and Oracle have in common? They are all victims of data breaches in 2016, and that is just to name a few. There are many others including LinkedIn, Dropbox, Philippine Commission of Elections, UC Berkeley, FACC and the list goes on. Falling victim to hackers is a real problem for organizations in this day and age. It doesn’t matter if you are an educational institution, a government agency, a corporation, or non-profit—you are a target.

Many organizations have upped the ante when it comes to security and risk mitigation. According to American Banker, banks alone will allocate a 10% increase in technology security. Organizations in other industries such as healthcare are doing the same thing. Many are being proactive by hiring “ethical hackers” to find the gaps, contracting security firms and using big data analytics to analyze voluminous amounts of data activity.

Visualizing the Voluminous Amounts of Data Activity to Mitigate Risk.

Since the cybersecurity team usually consists of a diverse mix of consultants, security firms, the IT department, and possibly ethical hackers, it is unlikely that all team members work in the same building, state, country… or even the same continent for that matter. These teams must be able to work together with the right tools to prevent and stop digital attacks. Tools such as  automated Artificial Intelligence systems can help monitor big data and detect a percentage of cyber-attacks, but can real-time data visualization take security to the next level in mitigating threats and, more importantly, improve response time during an attack?

The answer is simple: yes.

Data visualization can be infinitely customizable, which means you have the flexibility to pull critical real-time datasets into your data visualized dashboard. One of the biggest risks of sharing datasets over email and web conferencing is accuracy and reliability. In the event of an attack, the team (in different locations) can access the dashboard to visually display voluminous amounts of data in datasets to detect patterns and insight into the possibility of a series of attacks.

Data Visualization also gives you the freedom to visualize your data in the way that it makes most sense—the possibilities are seemingly endless. Some examples of what could be done are:

  • A comparative visualization of suspicious activity patterns
  • Heat maps to display reach and severity of an attack
  • Visualizing patterns to detect the possibility of additional attacks
  • Allowing the ability to highlight similar vulnerabilities exploited in previous attacks on a network

Mitigating cybersecurity threats continue to rise in priority as well as the amount of data collected. As overwhelming as big data is, it is an asset that can help prevent cyber-attacks if the right datasets are being used. The larger the data, the stronger your security.

Do you have questions about your big data and cybersecurity? We would love to talk to you.

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