Monday, September 21, 2015

SparkCognition’s SparkSecure, powered by IBM Watson, can predict and help prevent cyber attacks



Etopia News reached out to SparkCognition, part of the IBM Watson Ecosystem, and the leading cognitive security analytics company, asking if its systems could be used to protect the kind of processing that IBM Watson Health could do with electronic health records (EHRs).  Here’s what Amir Husain, Founder, CEO, and President of SparkCognition, had to say in reply:

”Yes, this is quite possible to do. Watson can have access to a variety of different types of knowledge based on the active corpus it has been trained on. SparkCognition has created a substantial security corpus that informs Watson of threats, remediation policies, software configuration and more. The same cloud resources can be used to host a Watson instance focused on health care information interpretation, while another Watson instance - using our CyberSecurity extensions to Watson, and our security corpus - can deliver security insights on the underlying healthcare app and access patterns to it.

“Watson is very useful when it comes to question and answer applications, where a human user has to find a quick and specific answer to a question that would otherwise require a lot of reading. SparkCognition's SparkSecure is useful for pattern construction, threat detection and other security focused alert, analysis and remediation flows. These two systems working together can secure many apps, including other Watson apps.

“As further elaboration of SparkSecure's security capabilities:

“SparkSecure provides predictive threat identification, detailed analytics, source reputation insight and many other capabilities. The deep data-driven insights enabled with SparkSecure allow even advanced attacks to be identified and isolated. When SparkSecure detects a new threat because of an underlying anomalous pattern it engages its automated natural language research capability to query web repositories and gain an understanding of the new attack. The result is an analysis and a percentage likelihood indicating whether the researched threat was a probable attack. With SparkCognition’s IBM Watson integration, IT teams are equipped with in-context consultation on how to deal with emerging threats. The question-and-answer prowess of Watson allows IT professionals to conduct a dialogue with the cognitive system in order to quickly understand the threat and arrive at a practical resolution. The key point is that, in this context, Watson is a research tool to extend what SparkSecure has learned. It is not useful to directly dump cryptic data such as logs, for example, directly into Watson.  So once SparkSecure detects a threat, Watson, with the right corpus, can tell an admin what that threat does and how to protect against it.”

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