Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022.  Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

What's in store for network detection and response

By Eyal Elyashiv, CEO and co-founder; and Dr. Aviv Yehezkel, CTO and co-founder; Cynamics

Businesses and governments are in a vulnerable state. With cyberattacks proliferating every industry and at greater speed, scale and sophistication, organizations need to make bold moves to succeed in this fight. Cybercriminals are opportunistic and during the pandemic, they were able to capitalize on the fact that critical infrastructure had to move operations online nearly overnight to accommodate the need for remote work. Organizations need to utilize protection capabilities to bridge that gap created in the rapid transition to the cloud during COVID-19. 

Threats to the network continue to grow more sophisticated

Attackers, terrorist groups and political activists are going to be using advanced technological capabilities to progress their agendas and carry out more sophisticated and widespread attacks than when business and the global economy were in survival mode. In the coming year, we'll see more of this taking place. Cybercrime is an iterative process; just as our solutions and technologies get smarter, so do the very criminals who seek to take down corporations and governments for ransom.

Bad actors will take greater advantage 

Just like organizations are using AI to cut through the noise and provide predictive rules - curating intelligence beyond what the human brain is capable of - cybercriminals are also taking advantage of this technology. AI can be found on both sides of the coin; AI is arming opportunistic bad actors with the intelligence needed to study and target organizations through things like random memory attacks, identification of specific vulnerabilities, exposing weaknesses, and launching custom attacks that go undetected due to no actual misconfiguration. Organizations need to fight machines with machines to overcome, outsmart, and dead end these attackers. 

The need for total visibility will be top of mind for network security operators  

In the never-ending game against cybercriminals, network security operators must continuously monitor the landscape. But they're burdened with using a myriad of tools that require integrations, knowledgeable personnel to manage and update systems. This is cumbersome, time-consuming, expensive, and if not closely monitored, could expose backdoors. Network operators must keep pace with advanced technologies and interconnectedness, but this leads to an increase in the attack surface, network complexity, and progresses the thread landscape due to potential vulnerabilities and exposed backdoors. It's impossible for businesses and governments to get ahead of the curve when they're deploying reactive cybersecurity - which is riddled with holes, exhaustive, costly, and not a long-term solution to an ever-ending problem.

Moving toward AI-based network detection and response

Traditionally, network detection and response (NDR) solutions have utilized deep packet inspection (DPI) to manually process traffic across the network. This was sufficient decades ago, but with today's landscape and increasing connectivity, it's nearly impossible for organizations and governments to adequately monitor the volume and variety of network traffic. Going forward, next-gen NDR solutions must use pattern inspection to analyze and monitor network traffic. Organizations will start capitalizing on AI and ML to digest traffic behavior, comparing historical values and trends to identify and predict suspicious patterns. Solutions that offer sample-based tools to support multi-architecture and multi-environment will gain in popularity as these can collect data from every network device and provide a flow summarization of 100% of the network packets. This lowers processing costs, requires no changes to the network, and imposes no additional risk on organizations.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Eyal Elyashiv is the CEO and co-founder and Dr. Aviv Yehezkel is the CTO and co-founder of Cynamics. Cynamics is the only Next Generation (NG) Network Detection and Response (NDR) solution in the market today using standard sampling protocols built-in to every gateway, patented algorithms, and AI and Machine Learning, to provide threat prediction and visibility at speed and scale.