I run the intellectual property protection shop for the company and our primary use case is to monitor for DLP.
In terms of detecting cyber and insider threats, my primary focus is insider threats. It's excellent at that. The ability for the system to detect events is incumbent upon knowing your own threats and risks and predefining those, to a large extent. If you know your environment well enough to make up your own rules and define exactly what a risk or threat means in your organization, it's outstanding at detecting them.
While my primary focus is insider threats, one of the reasons we like SNYPR more than other brands is the entity analysis piece. We have picked up unnamed entities - an infected machine or a machine that had been taken over through a fishing attempt and had a bot installed on it. We have been able to detect malicious software with the system without even predefining the threat or risk model.
When it comes to the solution's behavior analytics helping to prioritize advanced threats, as long as you can pre-define what you want it to prioritize, I find it to be excellent at doing that. We have a very small team. It's very important for me to have the Securonix system highlight the most critical threats so that the analyst can see it.
We have two models. There are the people who are reacting to something negative in the company, such as someone sending a lot of things to a USB drive or trying to email out a lot of sensitive documents. Those people are easy to catch because their behavior is anomalous to themselves and to others. But for the advanced threats, we have different models in place that will highlight what we call "low and slow" behavior, where someone might be placed in the organization by a competitor or a foreign country, with the intention of removing small amounts of data over a long period of time. We have successfully built models that detect that, as well. Any system can catch the people who are going to "break the window" and steal as much data as they can in 24 hours. It's the advanced threat that's much more intricate, but we have had success with that model.
The solution benefits our company overall in the sense that we are protecting intellectual property which is the key to the company's success. But there has been a direct benefit to my team as a force-multiplier. At any given time, I have three or four analysts and we have 120,000 end-users. I feel confident in the increase in the value of cases we have found. We bring in fewer cases per year, overall, and that's attributable to the ability to tune Securonix and drop things that might be more of a "coaching-letter" type of event, rather than an investigation. We're able to tune those so that they are less of a priority than the significant data-loss events. We've been successful at catching the data-loss events.
And the functionality within the Spotter tool has helped us eliminate many hours required to create link analysis diagrams, which we used to create by hand.
It has easily decreased the time required to investigate alerts by 30 to 35 percent. The Spotter functionality, where we create link analysis diagrams within Securonix, takes about five seconds to do. We type in the pipe symbol, the word "link," and a couple of arguments and it puts the link analysis diagram right in front of us. Before, it was a manual download from three different systems and we would put things into Excel or i2 Analyst's Notebook and do the link analysis diagram that way. That single step alone is something we do for every single case which an analyst writes up, and it easily represents 30 to 35 percent of their time.
The solution has also helped us to detect threats that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. In the past, when we were using just a SIEM tool, we had reports on things like the top-ten people each day sending email to a competitor's domain, or top-ten people emailing to a personal domain, or the top-ten people copying data to a USB. We looked at six of these lists every day. When we first started using Securonix, they came to us with an event that their system had detected, something which was a fairly significant event. When I went back and looked at why we hadn't caught it ourselves first, what had happened was that Securonix was able to accurately able to identify, with its pattern-matching functionality, two personal email addresses from this person and correlate that with USB use and their sending of emails to a competitor's domain. Out of the four domains, none was high enough to get on the top-10 lists, but all four together - when they were correlated together as a single event - were very significant. That enabled an analyst to see it and react to it.
Securonix has helped to surface high-risk events that require immediate action. The preceding example is a good one. Another good example is correlating events with foreign travel, for instance. One of the things we have programmed in is HR data around a known last-day-worked. We've been able to correlate people whose last day at work was within 48 or 96 hours of having foreign travel booked. Those things, by themselves, don't really mean anything, but as part of a model they add to the score of someone who has data leakage events. We've used those factors successfully to increase the score of someone with leakage events and prioritize them so that we can react before the person has left the company and the country.
We moved to their software as a service and cut over to production, officially, in January of this year (about five months ago). It has significantly reduced the amount of time spent by the technical lead on my team doing hands-on patching, maintenance, and troubleshooting on the host server, as well as fixing the server when there were application incompatibility issues. The previous version we had sat on a standard, company Linux server. Securonix was an application package, a COTS, for the most part, that sat on top of a standard-built server. The server represented a cost to us when purchasing it and there was a cost to maintain it. Moving it to the software as a service model in the cloud has completely cut out all of that. It's a less expensive model for us to operate under.
The Hadoop-based platform has also provided operational benefits. With the on-premise version that we had before, we were limited in the number of data inputs. As soon as we moved it to their Hadoop-based platform, it became unlimited. It's scalable to whatever size we need. We were able to quickly add six data sources to the system, which were impossible to add before.