15 Aug How Do Automation and Cybersecurity Work Together?

How automation may impact cybersecurity’s future

Modern automation is a growing part of the digital industry, especially when it comes to cybersecurity. Attackers are eager to deploy automated methods to attack networks, leading to a deluge of potential threats. Fighting this through traditional means – IT manpower – is a losing fight, so it’s crucial to consider automation for protective measures too. While it’s still growing, there are ways automation can be integrated into cybersecurity tasks.

The primary goal behind automation within cybersecurity is to create an intelligence capable of predicting threats and threat patterns before they have a chance to attack your network. This requires a lot of information and set up, but is entirely worth it. Malicious attacks evolve daily and they rapidly outpace methods used to thwart them. 

Data Integration

Typically it all starts with information and how said information is collected. A business must implement strategies to collect information on various attack vectors, understanding common patterns and building a digital warehouse of data. Understand how malware and malicious third-parties operate helps establish a behavior pattern, creating a foundation for automated defense.

This level of analysis is difficult, if not impossible, for a team of IT experts to accomplish on their own. It’s because the level of intrusions and malware types grow on such a heavy scale it’s difficult to keep pace.

Protection Implementation

As a net of protecting starts to form, deploying it is the next characteristic of automation in cybersecurity. With a founding base of information to draw from, automated tasks can identify and counter threats before they attack a network. 

The idea is to predict attacks, instead of manually create counters or solutions. There are simply too many threats in a given timeframe to stop with a team of experts. Using the information collected allows for successful prediction of malware behaviors and malicious attack patterns.

Analyzation

Automation also plays a role in analyzing networks and infrastructure for existing cybersecurity threats. It’s assumed that attack occurs at the moment of intrusion, but in fact, many malicious attacks can exist within a network for days, weeks, even months before deploying.

Using automation to collect information about malware patterns is an effective method of catching these sleeping threats, while also thwarting their attack via prediction instead of reacting to it. 

Finally, a primary need for automation in cybersecurity is because third parties use automated attacks for success. There is no feasible or practical way to maintain a defense against fast-moving malicious activity without automation implemented. Doing so across all devices, sandbox environments, and networks is a growing need, and will likely be essential in the continuing evolution of cybersecurity.

If you’d like to learn more about automating your IT infrastructure, you can contact us at Bytagig.