Deloitte Advisory Cyber Risk Services and Cray have introduced the first commercially available high-speed, supercomputing threat analytics service, Cyber Reconnaissance and Analytics. The subscription-based offering is designed to help organisations effectively discover, understand and take action to defend against cyber adversaries. The threat intelligence reports generated through this service are already enabling clients, including the Department of Defence, to focus remediation teams by providing detailed, actionable information on potential threat vectors and identifying specific flows, network locations, times and events. “We are leveraging Deloitte Advisory's Cyber Reconnaissance service to enable large scale cyber data analytics to more proactively defend our networks and support critical national missions,” said Clayton Jones, USPACOM J6 Senior Advisor and Strategic Cyber Integrator. “What do you look like to your adversary?” commented Deborah Golden, federal cyber risk services leader for Deloitte Advisory and principal at Deloitte & Touche LLP. “Instead of reviewing every component of an agency’s internal enterprise, we are trying to show what the adversary sees in order to give an organisation a true ‘risk profile.’ This includes the ability to effectively prioritise internal budgets and resources, and facilitate a realistic approach toward assessing network defence effectiveness.” The Cyber Reconnaissance and Analytics service is powered by the Cray® Urika®-GX system – Cray’s new agile analytics platform that fuses the Company’s supercomputing technologies with an open, enterprise-ready software framework for big data analytics. The Cray Urika-GX system gives customers unprecedented versatility for running multiple analytics workloads concurrently on a single platform that exploits the speed of a Cray supercomputer. By changing the perspective, increasing the volume of data and applying advanced analytics, an organisation can have a clearer view of true risk, exposure and malicious activity. This vantage point provides potential weaknesses, vulnerabilities and threat vectors that may highlight risks involving anomalous activities.
“Defending against sophisticated and evolving threats is an analytics problem squarely at the crossroads of big data and supercomputing,” said Barry Bolding, chief strategy officer at Cray. “This combination of Cray’s analytics platform and Deloitte Advisory’s threat risk management service is a formidable solution in the war on cyber-threats. Additionally, for the first time, customers can now utilise the power and capabilities of a Cray solution as-a-service.” Big data, cloud computing and highly-distributed enterprises are also impacting the threat landscape; and greatly increasing an enterprise’s potential surface area for attackers to compromise. Dynamic interconnections among entities (e.g., third parties, customers and the public) encourage free flow of data where the “system boundaries” are often beyond an agency’s or organisation’s (physical) walls. Data is generated and stored at a much faster rate than it can be analysed, leaving open opportunities for malicious content to hide and manoeuvre undetected.
“Teaming with Cray was a clear choice and allows for versatility combined with speed to tackle big data problems,” said Gordon Hannah, cyber reconnaissance and analytics leader for Deloitte Advisory cyber risk services and principal at Deloitte & Touche LLP. “Cyber analytics is about leveraging efficiencies and joining bits of knowledge together. With Cyber Reconnaissance, we utilise graph analytics to identify relationships and look for behavioural patterns versus querying for a known signature. Few solutions available today give customers the ability to have such high frequency insights.”
