There's AI and, er, AI....

It’s hard to recall a recent presentation from a vendor that didn’t include the AI or Machine-Learning buzz-phrases.

I’m not just talking IT here – coffee vending machines probably also incorporate some such logic; “by monitoring your coffee drinking profile, we are confident in pre-selecting your drink for you with total accuracy”. Actually, for me that’s not a complex algorithm – black Americano every time, just in case you’re buying…

In the world of Cyber Security though, it is fair to say that we’ve largely had our fill over its overuse – that and the “one size fits all” security story. No, it doesn’t, unless you are a company the size of – say – a Symantec, which has one of everything (and it’s all been designed to work on one platform, but that’s another story for another blog…). So it was refreshing recently to speak with a company called DataVisor in London, that a) doesn’t claim to do everything – the company focuses on fraud – and that b) does genuinely use AI (it correlates activity across accounts, so an anomaly is logically easy to spot). Of course, this can be done manually if you are one person with one account, but DataVisor has processed ITRO a trillion events across 4.2billion accounts. That’s a tough job to do with a network monitor and a spreadsheet…

Another important point to make is that, with security breaches in general, neither companies nor individuals think first about the impact of a breach, rather than just throwing money at preventing them – here’s the news: you can’t stop ALL attacks. Be prepared. So DataVisor focuses on impacts such as reputational damage, liability, the actual financial loss likely to be incurred, and so on. Common Sense as a Service (CSaaS).

Unsurprising therefore that the company is both growing rapidly and has some high profile customers across several verticals, from financial services to SM and mobile/gaming. And this despite hardly anyone having heard of the company. Methinks that’s very like to change in the very near future – definitely a vendor to keep an eye on (using AI or the manual method).