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Big Data as Superhero: Fighting Crime and Boosting Security

This article is more than 9 years old.

Talk about the law of unintended consequences. The visionaries who created the foundations for modern operating systems were rebelling against closed, proprietary systems, so they purposely made them open and easy to access. Security? We’re all colleagues here, they must have thought. We’re working to bring computing power to everyone. Why would we want to keep people out of a computer system?

Admirable, but impractical in this day and age. Over the course of my career, I’ve watched company after company tackle the security issue, churning out solutions for malware, intrusions, you name it. And yet breaches continue, with companies finding themselves in what looks like a lottery no one wants to win.

Can big data help? I’ve always been optimistic that its ability to absorb multiple data feeds and subject them to analysis, sometimes in real-time, might be the answer to the industry’s security conundrum. And now, a report issued last month from Nemertes Research indicates enterprises are doing just that.

As noted in this SearchSecurity article by Brandan Blevins, Nemertes CEO Johna Till Johnson believes there is a “perfect storm” in security that’s making enterprises turn to big data more often. First, hackers are bypassing traditional defenses. Second, C-level executives are starting to lose their jobs after breaches (that’ll really get their attention). Third, big data tools are becoming more sophisticated. "Attacks are coming from all different directions, and you can't really sit there and reverse engineer it and say, 'This indicates an attack,'" Johnson told Blevins. "But big data can do that for you."

The data itself, of course, will not be enough. As venture capitalist Neill Occhiogrosso rightly notes in this article of a couple of weeks ago on Tech Crunch, enterprises must have insight into the data too. “The future lies in analyzing this data to give security professionals a comprehensive view of their security posture. Tell them what is at risk, how severe the risk, how important the asset is, and how to fix it,” Occhiogrosso says. This will become increasingly important, he adds, with the growth of the cloud and BYOD (not to mention the Internet of Things).

It remains to be seen how well big data will work as a cybercrime buster, but as long as we’re putting a cape and a cowl on it, let’s also look at how it’s fighting crime beyond the enterprise. Recently in Prague, representatives of 16 EU countries met to “discuss the use of data analytics in modern policing, including the analysis of social media and geographical data,” as reported by Roland Moore-Colyer in V3 earlier this month.

As one Europol executive noted, “There is such a quantity of data that you simply have no other way but to involve analysts or sometimes teams of analysts working on the data and giving feedback to investigators to steer the investigation towards important directions and new suspects.”

There is, of course, the potential concern that agencies would start using big data for predicting crimes rather than solving them (cue Minority Report soundtrack), and according to this report from CloudTech about efforts in London, land of closed-circuit television, that’s exactly what the Metropolitan Police Service is doing: using software from Accenture that analyzes five years' worth of data to create “an accurate prediction of when / if a criminal will re-offend.” According to this article by Ryan Daws, the system monitored data about gang members over a four-year period and subsequently compared it to criminal acts conducted in the fifth year to see whether the software was accurate.

Personally, I’m not sure how using big data would be different than putting more cops on the beat during a crime wave – except that it’s less expensive and more accurate. I’m betting that big data can actually make both us and our data safer.