IBM gears up Watson to power its cognitive SOC platform

BANGALORE, INDIA: IBM Security today announced the availability of Watson for Cyber Security, the augmented intelligence technology designed to power cognitive security operations centers (SOCs).

According to IBM research, security teams sift through more than 200,000 security events per day on average, leading to over 20,000 hours per year wasted chasing false positives. The need to introduce cognitive technologies into security operations centers will be critical to keep up with the anticipated doubling of security incidents over the next five years and increased regulation globally.

“The Cognitive SOC is now a reality for clients looking to find an advantage against the growing legions of cybercriminals and next generation threats,” said Denis Kennelly, Vice President of Development and Technology, IBM Security. “Our investments in Watson for Cyber Security have given birth to several innovations in just under a year. Combining the unique abilities of man and machine intelligence will be critical to the next stage in the fight against advanced cybercrime.”

Over the past year, Watson has been trained on the language of cybersecurity, ingesting over 1 million security documents. Watson can now help security analysts parse thousands of natural language research reports that have never before been accessible to modern security tools.

Watson for Cyber Security will be integrated into IBM’s new Cognitive SOC platform, bringing together advanced cognitive technologies with security operations and providing the ability to respond to threats across endpoints, networks, users and cloud.

The centerpiece of this platform is IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson, the first tool that taps into Watson’s corpus of cybersecurity insights. This new app is already being used by Avnet, University of New Brunswick, Sopra Steria and 40 other customers globally to augment security analysts’ investigations into security incidents.

IBM has also invested in research to bring cognitive tools into its global X-Force Command Center network, including a Watson-powered chatbot currently being used to interact with IBM Managed Security Services customers.

IBM also revealed a new research project, code-named Havyn, pioneering a voice-powered security assistant that leverages Watson conversation technology to respond to verbal commands and natural language from security analysts.

As security teams evolve their strategies and tactics to thwart cyber-criminals, the introduction of cognitive technologies into today’s security operations centers will be critical to keep pace. A recent IBM study found that only 7 percent of security professionals are using cognitive tools today, but that usage is expected to triple over the next 2-3 years.

The IBM Cognitive SOC platform puts cognitive technologies into security analystss hands, enhancing their ability to fill gaps in intelligence and act with speed and accuracy.

To extend the ability of the Cognitive SOC to endpoints, IBM Security also is announcing a new endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution called IBM BigFix Detect. The solution helps organizations gain full visibility into the constantly changing endpoint threat landscape while bridging the gap between malicious behavior detection and remediation.

IBM will also help clients design, build and manage cognitive security operations centers globally through IBM Managed Security Services. Over the past five years, IBM has built over 300 security operations centers for clients in dozens of industries, including consumer packaged goods, retail, banking and education. Clients can choose to have IBM build their cognitive SOC on-premise or manage it virtually via the IBM Cloud as part of the IBM X-Force Command Center network.