Edgar Villegas blog

Watch new AT&T Archive films every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at http://techchannel.att.com/archives In the late 1960s, Bell Laboratories computer scientis...

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In the same week, my local newspaper ran a story about the hacking of celebrities’ cell phone photos and a separate story about a data breach at 216 neighborhood Jimmy John’s restaurants across the country.

Meanwhile, some of our most trusted global retailers have been the victims of customer data leaks. And governments around the world are struggling to balance the privacy of citizens with the data surveillance needs for preventing legitimate cyber and terrorist threats.

The clear message here is that no one is immune. Cybersecurity is an issue that affects us all.

But what can we do to keep our personal data safe, to ensure our business and transaction data is secure, and to develop surveillance programs within reason to support national security?

In each of those areas – at home, at work and in our national defense – how can analytics play a role?

First, let’s look at the real issues: Networks are being infiltrated in many different ways. From individuals, from computers, from automated systems, from inside and outside trusted boundaries. How can you prevent the threat or recognize the vulnerability when it is happening so quickly and in so many different guises?

And time is of the essence. You can’t wait an hour, a day or a week. If you can’t detect the breach when it’s happening, you don’t have a chance of avoiding potential devastation to your business, your personal reputation or your nation’s security.

What is the solution? We’ve seen that high-speed analytics can detect credit card fraud in the instant that it is happening. And we know how to capture and analyze data as it streams continuously into the network from sensors and devices. Today’s top experts in cybersecurity are combining these concepts to compare normal behavior with abnormal behavior, and to model legitimate traffic so that the system can detect the opposite: suspect behavior.

For instance, should this machine be talking to that machine? Is this frequency of network traffic common for this time of day? Does data passing from this location to that location fit into a larger pattern?

The data is streaming too fast for a human to ask and answer these types of questions. But advanced analytics and the technologies mentioned above make it possible to answer them all within seconds.

When those seconds could be the difference needed to keep your iPhone photos private, to ensure your credit card information is secure and to protect your national interests from cybercrime, I think the answer is clear:

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