The Speed of RPA: Your Weapon Against Cyberattacks

The faster an enterprise can locate a cyberattack, the better the chance to remediate the attack before significant damage in terms of lost data, income, business reputation, and more can happen. Intelligent automation software bots, combining Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI), offer a solution to what has been a challenging experience for security teams and businesses in general.

Attacks here, there—everywhere

Cyberattacks can occur in many ways and through many places, including software, websites, emails, and logins. And the number of attacks is increasing—300,000 pieces of malware are created every day; 64% of companies worldwide have experienced a cyberattack. So, it’s no wonder that executive enterprise technology decision-makers have listed cybersecurity as the top tech priority for the next 12 months.

The problem is, how do human security professionals quickly and easily find a needle in the haystack? With conventional security solutions, most enterprises receive more than 10,000 cyber alerts about potential incidents a day. Depending on the industry, some see a much higher number. Financial institutions are one example, with 100,000 alerts a day. Many of those alerts are false positives or true positives with little potential impact on the enterprise.

Imagine the time and resources required for a security team to sift through each of the alerts. And suppose there is an alert about a true, potentially destructive attack buried in the crowd. Will the team be able to locate it and act in time to minimize the damage caused by a breach? According to an IBM survey, it can take an average of 280 days for a team to identify and contain a breach. With people in home offices today, 76% of the survey respondents stated remote work would increase that time.

Working from home with different ISPs and levels of internet security also opens the door for more incidents and more alerts. In some cases, overwhelmed security teams ignore alerts, so an attack could continue unchecked.

A solution by its nature

Software bots are designed to automate manual, repetitive processes, streamlining and accelerating those processes. In other words, instead of a security team spending up to 30 minutes manually investigating each incident, a bot can perform the task in seconds—without human intervention. Multiply that time savings by 10,000 or 100,000 alerts and the bots’ impact on an enterprise’s ability to effectively detect and respond to an attack, as well as to free up a team to focus on other security issues, is huge.

Bots can provide 24/7, year-round security coverage, error-free. They can also help with the automatic rollout of security upgrades and patches, eliminating delays that can open the door to vulnerabilities.

Bots can play a critical role in cybersecurity defense, continuously monitoring alerts from all endpoints, as well as in cybersecurity offense, probing and conducting vulnerability assessments. They can be designed to monitor, detect, analyze, and remediate a wide variety of potential incidents and attack vectors. Consider a few of many:

• Compromised credentials
  One of the common areas of attack is access credentials: username and password. When stolen or exposed, those credentials can give intruders a low-hanging-fruit entrance into an enterprise without safeguards. Say for example a business user who works out of a San Jose, CA, company logs in within 10 minutes of someone logging in with the same credentials somewhere in Europe. An alert about a suspicious incident is created by the company’s security system.
  
  A bot created to handle logins can automatically detect the alert, analyze it using pre-defined criteria to determine if it requires attention, and contact the user through email or an internal communication channel for confirmation about where the user is located—in this case, San Jose. The bot can then block the European access based on user feedback or can bypass the user and take predefined steps for blocking access. All the bot’s work can be done in seconds—without a security team getting involved.
  
  
• Unauthorized accessibility
  A bot can be designed to restrict access to sensitive data on an as-required basis, protecting against an external attack and unintentional or intentional exposure by an employee. The bot can add an encryption layer for greater security and even record actions regarding that data in a log to create an audit trail.
  
  
• Compromised applications and attachments
  With access to intelligence about viruses/malware, a bot can automatically analyze an alert about a threat originally embedded in an application or email attachment. Then, it can make a decision, based on programming, about how to proceed, including alerting the security team and users and/or moving ahead to contain or remove the threat.
  
  
• Data loss
  A cyberattack can rob a company of critical business data without the company even knowing it. A bot can be designed to monitor loss. When data goes missing, security controls can be quickly implemented to stop the leak.

The faster to know, the less to lose

Intelligent automation bots can put you in the know, in no time—helping your security team and users meet the challenges of combating cyberattacks.