Automated response needed to tackle cyber threats: Sophos

With cyber threats becoming more lethal by the day, experts call for automated responses to ward off cyber attacks in organisations.

The IT departments in corporates and organisations need to keep tabs on cyber-criminals, who launch stealth attacks on their networks to find weak links.

“The focus can no longer be on protection and detection, but also intelligent and automated response to isolate an attack moving through the network,” said Ross McKercher, Chief Information Security Officer of cyber security solutions firm Sophos. With improvement in endpoint protection, cyber-criminals have started looking for alternative weak or vulnerable entry points, in order to sneak into systems and networks.

Engineering skills

He argues that IT departments will need more development and engineering skills to gear up for the newer threats.

“The IT infrastructure these days is defined by code; breaches are increasingly caused by weak applications and automation is essential for under-staffed teams. This is changing the skillset required for security professionals,” he said.

“People are relying more on open source libraries that are often maintained very informally by loose-knit communities that are easy to infiltrate. This used to be the domain of nation states but the criminals are getting in on the action,” he said.

According to him, legacy (older) applications will continue to be a fertile hunting ground for cyber criminals.

Sophos forecast faster deployment of machine learning (ML) tools by security experts in organisations. It felt that engineers manning security operation centres would embrace ML tools and techniques that were once confined to data science experts.

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