Navigating Threats in the Wild with the Help of AI and Cross-Domain Telemetry

August 20, 2024

These days, cybersecurity can feel like the unpredictable environment of a jungle — complete with wild animals and danger seemingly around every turn. Just as you need the right knowledge, tools and guidance to navigate the jungle safely, individuals and organizations need comprehensive measures and support to protect against complex security threats.

Security Readiness for Threats in the Wild

Billions of ever-expanding connections are made every day by organizations across the internet. There are more applications and data to protect than ever before, so organizations are more vulnerable than ever against increasingly sophisticated attacks. In fact, 73% of all organizations believe they are likely to be disrupted by a cybersecurity incident in the next 12-24 months.

Many of these sophisticated attacks rely on DNS activity. In the Cisco Cyber Threat Trends Report, the three most seen threat categories were information stealers, trojans and ransomware. Security readiness against these threats and additional threats in the wild can be challenging to combat without DNS-layer security. It’s one piece of a bigger security puzzle that can set organizations on the right path.

Complexity Breeds Complication

Greater threats require greater resources, and the talent shortage is being felt by small and large organizations. While companies race to ramp up resources, the complexity of their security stack is further slowing them down or making their responses less efficient.

In the Cisco Cybersecurity Readiness Index Report, more than two-thirds (67%) of companies said they have more than 10 point solutions in their security stack, with 25% admitting they have more than 30 point solutions. If we take a step back, we realize this reflects the way in which the industry has evolved over the years: new threats emerged and new solutions were developed and deployed to counter them, either by existing vendors or new ones.

Today, this approach isn’t working, and the complexity of multiple point solutions breeds complication that impact a team’s ability to detect, respond to and recover from incidents. We’re seeing the market move toward tool rationalization and vendor consolidation to achieve a more holistic and in-depth approach to security.

The Next Era of Security

“As more data is generated through the normal operations of modern business and our digital-driven lives, the attack surface along with sources for AI disinformation widens. Whether used to generate clicks or profit, large volumes of data increase AI accuracy." — Jeff Campbell, Cisco SVP and Chief Government Strategy Officer

Advancements in AI and the mainstream availability of capabilities like generative AI are empowering malicious actors. We need to go on the offense as an industry — making AI pervasive to assist, augment and automate security solutions. A platform approach also helps us get ahead of attackers because you can't protect what you can't see. Correlated telemetry across the domains of email, web, endpoint and network means better visibility and protection.

In the next decade, enterprise adoption of AI will accelerate, products built with broader data stores will have bigger success in the market and consolidation of the security stack will continue.

Innovation Makes It Easier and Safer for Everyone

Organizations are recognizing the urgency to continually improve their cybersecurity game, and innovation is necessary to help keep readiness as a priority. This level of innovation includes designing and deploying solutions built with AI in mind to make security easier and safer for everyone.

It’s a critical time for organizations to start embedding AI into their growth strategy (beyond just security) and think about the kind of partnerships that are needed in our collective AI journey. From handling the infrastructure, articulating the business objectives and value, harnessing the data insights, to providing the end-to-end security, external cybersecurity expertise helps close key gaps.

With ongoing, AI-driven innovation to better stop known and unknown vulnerabilities, threats and bad actors, we can avoid the lions, mosquitos and piranhas lurking in your networks.