We recently attended a fascinating webinar presented by the cybersecurity experts at Mandiant, a FireEye company.
The webinar, entitled Tools of Engagement – Zero Dark 243 Days, presented real world examples of the important cybersecurity maxim of Dr. Frederick Chang, former NSA Director of Research:
… cybersecurity is fundamentally about an adversarial engagement. Humans must defend machines that are attacked by other humans using machines.
It was interesting to hear the Mandiant experts describe how, after determining they were being attacked, the defenders were able to use information gleaned from the spearphishing attack to identify the attack command and control infrastructure. Of course, the first step was identifying the spearphishing attack. Having identified the command and control infrastructure, the defenders were then able to thwart the attack. When asked about the role of big data in cyberdefense, the Mandiant experts said that massive amounts of data were less useful than specific knowledge of the means and methods used by the attackers. You can hear them discuss big data starting at 58:00 in the webinar.
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