Cyber Security Transformation: An Underpinning for IBM’s expansion

New York-based IBM corporation was awarded 9,100 patents in past year, again making it a lead scorer of the list for the most US patents granted in a given year. The company announced its achievement on January 8. Cyber Security innovation was one such factor with more than 1,400 granted patents that towed the company at this success ladder in 2018.

IBM clutched the opportunity among security patents for battling voice phishing (vishing). The company was also permitted patent for optimizing security analysis in cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) ecosystem that may aid other organisations coordinate malicious activities. Container Security, enabling improvised isolation capabilities were also one of the influences that dragged IBM to the top of the list.

Marc Ph. Stoecklin, principal research scientist and manager of Cognitive Cybersecurity Intelligence at IBM Research quoted "What the 1,400 patents shows is that IBM is doing a big push on cyber-security and it has become a key pillar of our DNA, after all, cyber-security is going to become one of the key pain points of every organization out there."

He also added that at IBM there has been a heavy thrust on brewing Artificial Intelligence (AI) potentials with cyber-security efforts. A large portion of IBM's cyber security patents are found in certain ways that Artificial Intelligence can be employed to revamp outcomes including better diagnosis of advanced risks. IBM is amalgamating with AI to develop virtual and effective advisers to support security teams in performing efficiently and responding productively to cyber threats with an adaptive approach.

Let's have a glance at different patents that guided the steps of successful year for IBM in 2018.

Abstraction of Vishing

In US, vishing patent is precisely labelled as US Patent #10,068,575 and is denominated as "Cognitive Security against Voice Phishing Activity." As per IBM Patent description explanation – In a Vishing attack, hackers use a voice over IP (VoIP) system to charade their caller identity to trick victims. In an attempt to monitor and analyse the voice conversation between two parties and identify one as guilty of deceiving other, IBM has patented a question and answer apparatus.

Stoecklin further asserted "This patent is about analysing a conversation and trying to find out whether some personal information is trying to be extracted."

Security Analysis Optimisation

The second facet of prosperity in terms of innovation for IBM was US Patent #10,084,804, also termed as "Optimising Security Analysis in SaaS." According to Stoecklin, this particular patent is about assisting teams augment information from examined incidents in their Qradar SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) systems. This enriched innovation comprises of capability to coordinate threat data and other collected data to deduce the chances of malicious activity.

Stoecklin said "It is a very interesting patent which touches on a lot of technical aspects, including connecting dots and basically bridging knowledge gaps… This patent was a major breakthrough in helping security teams get faster responses and non-intuitive connections to information for security events they see and immediately known if there is anything else out there that they should be aware of."

Container Security: Improved Isolation Capabilities

IBM's patent for container security enabling improvised isolation capabilities was one of the core aspects for accomplishment of the company in 2018. It is formally designated as US Patent #9,886,303 that interprets an innovation for a particular virtualization control.

The patent has a slight approach towards improving isolation and security between a cloud application and its presenter. According to IBM, it also reduces provisioning time and upgrades performance. This innovation could enable companies with easy movement of data and applications securely across on premises and cloud environment as well.

Prospective Blueprint

Stoecklin said that his squad has been operating on innovation research akin to cyber security fraud activities and technologies with voluminous awaited patent indexing. He affirmed "We are rethinking the traditional approach of how security is being done today, with most organizations having a default deny strategy to block whatever you know you don't want to have on your network… But that is a huge risk on the defender because you have to know what you don't want."

Additionally, he said "We're putting in quite a bit of innovation at the moment into different types of cyber deceptive systems which help us to move risk from the defenders to the attackers… It's a number of patents we're working on, we have already filed them, and they're using AI to start orchestrating some of these deceptive responses on different levels."

The base strategy behind the deception handling is to let every end be at default condition and then plant a trap and bait everywhere as a primary admonishing to spot malicious activities.