On one end of the spectrum, cyberattacks in Asia-Pacific and elsewhere are at an all-time high, and adversaries are growing more advanced by the day. On the other, executive management wants to make sure the organization is safe. The chief information security officer (CISO) is caught in the middle with a thin security force thanks to the IT skills gap and limited security intelligence resources. Cognitive security is the savior to help the CISO overcome these challenges.

What Is Cognitive Security?

Traditional security systems were built to work on structured data. In today’s digital world, a lot of information is published in blogs, research articles and images. Current systems do not draw any intelligence from these data sources. According to the IBM study “Cybersecurity in the Cognitive Era: Priming Your Digital Immune System,” around 80 percent of this intelligence resides in unstructured data.

Cognitive solutions enable IT professionals to discover new insights and observe patterns in the context of security. With cognitive security systems, IT teams can quickly interpret data from tens of thousands of documented software vulnerabilities, research papers and security blogs and integrate it with structured data from various sources.

Understand, Reason, Learn

Watson for Cyber Security, IBM’s flagship cognitive security solution, follows a three-step process: understand, reason and learn.

First, Watson draws from IBM’s comprehensive X-Force library to learn the language of the security industry. Next, it analyzes new information as it is published to gain new, more advanced insights. Finally, Watson will train with renowned security experts, top universities and their students to learn the language of security on a broader, deeper level.

If Watson can win “Jeopardy!”, it can certainly help analysts respond to threats more effectively.

A CISO’s Best Friend

Cognitive security enables IT teams to uncover new patterns by analyzing staggering amounts of structured and unstructured data, automate threat response and remediate offenses with improved accuracy and confidence. In addition, cognitive solutions offer recommendations based on evidence-based reasoning that enable IT leaders to make smarter decisions.

CISOs recognize the challenge to reduce average incident response and resolution times. According to the IBM survey, 57 percent of security leaders believe cognitive security solutions can significantly slow the efforts of cybercriminals. It’s not surprising, then, that experts predict a threefold increase in the number of professionals implementing cognitive security solutions over the next few years.

Introducing the Cognitive SOC

Announced in February 2017, the IBM Cognitive Security Operations Center (SOC) brings cognitive technologies into the SOC, augmenting analysts’ ability to fill gaps in intelligence and act with speed and accuracy. It connects obscure data points humans cannot identify on their own, enabling enterprises to more quickly and confidently tackle cyber threats. The Cognitive SOC is the industry’s only security operations and response platform integrating advanced cognitive technologies to understand and respond to sophisticated threats across cloud, networks, endpoints and users.

Watch the on-demand webinar to learn more about the Cognitive SOC and to see a demo of QRadar Advisor with Watson. Participants will also hear from a beta client, David Shipley of the University of New Brunswick, on his experience using the app.

Watch the on-demand webinar: How Watson is Revolutionizing the Security Operations Center