Dimension Data Enhances Its Threat Intelligence Capabilities

Dimension Data has enhanced its Threat Intelligence Center services with industry leading capabilities that aim to empower business enterprises with data-driven automation, incident response and improved security operations.

 The enhanced capabilities will enable organizations to collect data about security threats from multiple sources and respond to them with limited human assistance. The Threat Intelligence Center integrates existing cybersecurity solutions for improved efficiency in physical intervention and digital security operations, empowering organizations to develop well-structured standard operating procedures for cyber security.

Commenting on the new developments, Dr. Bright Mawudor, Managed Security Services & Consulting Practice Lead at Dimension Data East Africa said that the current systems being used by many companies in the local market are underutilized and somewhat inefficient which frequently leads to unresolved or unseen alerts – a critical risk factor that may result in a breach and compromise of business operations.

“Such breaches, if successful, attract hefty penalties from regulators and also have catastrophic effects on business operations. Regulations in the region are becoming more stringent with compliance requirements ever growing. Dimension Data’s Threat Intelligence Centre addresses this risk by accurately documenting incidents, automatically resolving them both simultaneously and in a very short time using customized intelligent scripts,” he added.

Mawudor reiterated that whilst organizations have visibility of malicious activities in their systems, they largely remain unmitigated due to numerous activities being logged in real time, the bulk of which are humanly impossible to analyze, categorize and address accurately or in time.

He noted that a standard model for a security team to tackle various potential attacks require extensive knowledge base in incident response, offensive/defensive security, threat hunting & analysis, and remediation. A collaboration between all the above personnel, if they all do exist in an organization can take hours if not days to close one case.

“We’re simplifying the process for clients to accelerate use case adoption, streamline the integration process, and create and share context thus creating more robust security program overall. A resilient organization should have visibility of their systems at all times and be able to respond in time to cyber-attacks or unauthorized activities, but many organizations still face major challenges as a result of too many systems, lack of adequate human resources and limited skills to tackle the evolving threat landscape,” said Ishmael Muli, Head of Intelligent security at Dimension Data East Africa.

He added that most financial institutions in Kenya have Security Incident and Event Management systems that correlate data from multiple devices to provide alerts of impending cyber-attacks real time. Security teams within these financial institutions are however busy with the day to day activities and never have the time to check logs or even the 1000s of alerts that come in per hour. Analyst fatigue causes them to miss out on important elements to delve into and only go back to check the logs after a significant attack has occurred for a root cause analysis to be performed.

Muli observed the need for security analysts to constantly adapt to increasingly sophisticated cyberthreats through new monitoring tools.

“As attackers continue automating their procedures, organizations need to leverage more intelligent systems as a counter offensive. This requires effective automation of all business-critical systems to proactively respond to incidences and allow for human intervention and investigation at a later stage. Intelligent tools are designed to plug into existing architecture and help reduce response time by up to 86 percent,” he added