Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 37 | Page 96

t cht lk most on cybersecurity technology, is so far behind.So where does the problem lie? Ask any SOC or incident response team – it’s the sheer volume of items needing analysis and response, alerts reported by both users and machines. Automation saves time. People save the day. Humans and machines – now let’s talk solutions. When your phishing response uses each in the smartest ways, you can stop active threats faster and more efficiently, rather than drowning in emails and leaving your network exposed. I have a customer who used to spend an entire day, or the better part of one, manually sorting through emails reported to his abuse box. I’m talking about a highly skilled incident response professional who would rather hunt threats than look at mountains of spam. 96 INTELLIGENTCIO “ ANOTHER COFENSE CUSTOMER STOPPED A PHISHING ATTACK IN ONLY 19 MINUTES. AGAIN, A BALANCE OF AUTOMATION AND HUMAN INTELLIGENCE MADE THE DIFFERENCE. Now he handles this task in an hour or sometimes less. The difference: automated email analysis combined with a great spam filter. His platform weeds out spam and other harmless emails, plus groups verified phishing emails by attribute and campaign. These groups, or clusters, let him respond to entire phishing campaigns – way more efficient than responding to this email, and this one, and that one, etc. The automation even extends to security playbooks. Instead of spending his highly paid time on basic response tasks, this IR pro is happy to rely on automation. But when it’s time to make critical decisions, he’s at the wheel. Know why? His expertise and intuition are irreplaceable. This is the point in the response chain where he earns his salary by saving the day against malware, wire-transfer scams, you name it. And don’t forget, many of those analysed emails came from human reporters – users trained to recognise and report phishing. When those www.intelligentcio.com