Boosting Cybersecurity Efficiency with Knowledge Graphs

The increased use of digital operations across every industry around the world has emboldened cyber criminals to try more and more inventive ways of compromising and stealing company information or disrupting operations.

Today, we hear of major cyber attacks more often than ever before. In the past decade, the most notorious incident was probably the Yahoo data breach of 2013 in which all three billion user accounts were hacked and compromised.

The Increasing Threat of Cyber Attacks

Attacks are increasingly sophisticated and security breaches are growing, Accenture said in its Ninth Annual Cost of Cybercrime Study from 2019. According to their study, a total of 79% of business leaders report that new business models introduce technology vulnerabilities faster than they can be secured.

In the world of more and more cyber attacks, it’s not only enterprises that need to up their game. Cybersecurity companies whose business is to protect enterprises from all kinds of cyber threats also need to adapt on the fly in a constantly changing environment.

Responding To Newer and Newer Threats

Cybersecurity companies have to quickly adjust their services not only to cover a growing number of targets but also to counter the growing number of methods cyber criminals use to attack enterprises. They have to collect and analyze various types of information about new malware or ransomware threats, new viruses and new vulnerabilities in their customers’ systems.

In other words, they need to be able to access an up-to-date picture of all potential cyber threats, which are buried in tons of data, both structured and unstructured, coming from various sources.

Knowledge Graphs Are The Key To Efficient Cybersecurity

To handle the huge volumes of heterogeneous data about cyber threats, some cybersecurity companies have turned to knowledge graphs. These machine-readable graph structures help enterprises smoothly integrate both structured and unstructured data in a semantic representation of real-world entities and the relationships between them.

The semantics is used not only to express and interpret the underlying data, but also to infer new facts out of the existing data. As a result, the flexible graph structure of knowledge graphs allows users to keep dynamically updated information of the latest threats and vulnerabilities discovered by cybersecurity experts.

Ontotext’s Solution: A Live Cybersecurity Knowledge Graph

At the request of a multinational cybersecurity and defense company, Ontotext has developed a live, flexible and scalable knowledge graph representing their clients’ security infrastructure and all available cyber threat intelligence.

The cybersecurity knowledge graph is powered by Ontotext’s leading graph database GraphDB. Its inference capabilities enable the company to easily discover relevant cybersecurity information about each new security alert and use it for making fast decisions.

With the help of Ontotext’s live cyber security knowledge graph, the cybersecurity and defense company is able to smoothly integrate new data sources and easily search and navigate this dynamically updated information.

Is your enterprise facing similar challenges?