The Beauty Behind Shark Week

Shark Week really is a genius idea.

Shark Week is an annual event on The Discovery Channel featuring nothing but shark-related programming, both real and fictional. It began in 1988 and is incredibly popular, which is why it is the longest-running cable programming event in history. That popularity comes from our collective fascination with and fear of the hunters of the deep. It’s like the movie “Jaws,” minus the great storytelling.

According to National Geographic, an average of five people per year are killed by sharks. That’s less than one one-thousandth of the number killed by freshwater snails, which can cause a deadly disease called schistosomiasis. Despite this, no one is hosting Snail Week.

This is why Shark Week is such a great idea: It is selling a danger there is little risk of ever encountering. The same thing happens with a lot of computer security programs. They play off the idea that you might be hit by whatever the big thing is in the news at that moment.

Taking a Bite Out of Threats

Each organization has its own unique network developed to meet its specific needs. Because of that, each one faces a unique set of threats. You need to find the threats relevant to your organization and prioritize them to remediate the most critical and lethal ones first.

A security intelligence solution lets organizations figure out what threats to focus on out-of-the-box. Using a single architecture for analyzing log, flow, vulnerability, user and asset data, it gives near real-time correlation and behavioral anomaly detection, which separates the high-risk threats from the shark attacks. It also offers full visibility into network, application and user activity.

Finding problems is one thing; it’s fixing them immediately and keeping your company out of the news that really matters. Using endpoint protection platforms automates the tedious but time-consuming tasks associated with remediating cyberthreats. That might make new threats less interesting, but sometimes dull is good.

Organizations need to have an integrated security system that can filter out existing vulnerabilities that have already been remediated while focusing on the high-risk threats so they can shut down a potential attack. Enterprises also need the tools to take action and remediate threats quickly before they are exploited by cybercriminals. With the seamless integration of tools such as IBM BigFix and QRadar, you get accelerated risk prioritization and incident response systems to keep your corporate and customer data secure.