Big data | Branden R. Williams, Business Security Specialist

Consider the Hawthorne Effect for Big Data standard

The Hawthorne Effect is a term coined to explain inconclusive results from a set of studies performed at Western Electric Company’s Hawthorne Works on worker productivity from the 1920s and 30s. Essentially, researchers were confused with the productivity results from two specific parts of the study—changes in illumination levels and worker break time—which improved productivity only during the study. Workers knew they were being studied, thus improved productivity regardless of the changes implemented by the researchers. The Hawthorne Effect is used to describe positive results from research as influenced by the workers, not by the actual independent variables studied. Researchers today now work to reduce this effect through a number of ways, but it is still a tricky process. The ...

Big Data Fuels Intelligence-Driven Security standard

On Tuesday, RSA released a new security brief entitled “Big Data Fuels Intelligence-Driven Security.” Indeed, one of the themes of this blog over the last year or so has been looking for the bad guys hiding in plain sight. Your standard controls won’t catch them—or at least won’t catch them in time. Instead, you will probably rely on poorly constructed logs and expensive forensics to try and piece together exactly what happened. The brief identifies two key shifts are driving the need for behavior-based controls: Dissolving network boundaries whereby legitimate users are probably not doing all of their activity within the physical four walls of the building, and Adversaries are getting much more sophisticated and they surgically attack organizations using ...

Securing Distributed Infrastructure standard

With Harvard Business Review calling the Data Scientist the sexiest career for the next 10 years, security professionals are going to have their hands absolutely full with securing the distributed infrastructure that powers big data analytics. The Hadoop infrastructure isn’t just one tool that you download to get you some Big Data fun, it’s really a framework of a multitude of tools (and options for substitution) that each carry out specific tasks in a distributed and flexible way. Part of the driving force behind wide-scale Hadoop environments is the notion that it is easier to move computation capabilities than it is to move data. This means that nodes will have some slice of data, but the end result analytics would ...

Big Data vs Social Engineering standard

Some of the discussions we are having over here are brain-wrinklers! I was speaking with some colleagues yesterday about the security implications of big data. Typically I would group them into two separate ares: Using big data as an enabler for predictive security analytics (i.e., deriving security information powered by analytics across big data) Securing the output of big data analytics on the business side (and possibly in infosec too) After talking about some of the uses of Greenplum Chorus, it occurred to me that there was a third area that needs to be addressed: the security problem of using independent but diverse big data sets to arrive at the same conclusion (especially when that conclusion could be part of ...

To Win, you must Know Everything standard

I hate when people use the term “cyberwarefare” outside of its original context—a true war of nations trading bombs for bytes in the tubes. Sure, organizations are being attacked by nefarious groups that seem to be marching toward specific and fruitful goals, but is it really cyberwarfare? Regardless of what you want to call it, you still must act and react like someone is launching a digital missile campaign against your information. You can either sit and wait for someone else to tell you that you have been compromised, or you can take ownership of the problem and start up-leveling your intelligence gathering and analysis. It’s the Big Data problem of security. Your enemy is doing this, so why aren’t ...

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