Cyber breach victims are reacting too slowly to mass customer data thefts, analytics firm SAS has warned.
The company has revealed it is pushing its analytics software at victims of cyber attacks, claiming most tools on the market do not reveal the extent of damage wrought by hackers until it is too late.
CMO Jim Davis used his keynote at SAS’s annual Premier Business Leadership Series in Las Vegas to tell the audience: "[Cyber attacks] are happening so frequently now and they follow the same pattern. The company attacked, they issue a release saying ‘someone breached our firewall but it probably wasn’t a big deal’.
"Three days later they tell you that 800 million people were compromised. It happens every time."
He added that current analysis tools are not good enough to help companies react quickly to such attacks.
"You look at all the solutions in the market today and they’re capturing the data real time," he said. "They may be capturing it, but analysis is taking a very long time and they may look back and say ‘oh goodness, look at this, we had an attack three days ago’.
"If it was three days ago, it is way, way too late and chances are a lot more happened than you are aware of."
Stationery company Staples appears to be the latest victim of a spate of recent data breaches, with the firm investigating potential attacks at a string of stores.
It follows eBay being served with a class action lawsuit in July after losing as many as 145 million customers’ personal data in February.
And Davis warned that hackers have grown too sophisticated for tools that simply check for IP addresses originating from countries that should not appear on the company website, explaining that behavioural analytics examining data packets, speed of activity and other factors is necessary.
SAS CEO Jim Goodnight said his company relies on the fast data-processing ability of its in-memory analytics server LASR and its Event Stream Processing Engine to discover hackers in near real-time.
SAS has also set up a cyber group to use the event streaming engine to collect all data generated inside a data centre.
Goodnight said: "Every router, every device, every time it does something it writes out a log record. Well, we’re taking those log records straight into memory and analysing them right then and there to look for things that are out of the norm.
"We’re talking about 10 million records an hour at least from those data centres. Our goal is to try and spot anomalies almost instantly so we can stop versus doing a post-mortem a couple of days later."
With new EU data regulations expected to be introduced by the end of the year, punishments for data breaches are about to get a lot harsher.
The Information Commissioner’s Office can currently levy a maximum £500,000 fine on firms that have suffered a data leak, but under the new regulations that will increase to €100m, or 5% of annual revenue.
