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Cybersecurity in ASEAN: An Urgent Call to Action
The Australian Cyber Security Research Institute (ACSRI) has been set up and funded by the
Australian government. ACSRI combines private companies, public agencies, and universities
with a focus on leading cyber research. ACSRI participants have committed about $90million, and
the Australian government has augmented this with an additional $50 million. ACSRI is industry
led—minimizing the risk of wasting research funds on areas that are being done commercially
elsewhere or where Australia does not have a competitive advantage. ACSRI aims to support
about 600 postgraduate research personnel over seven years.
Automation and artificial intelligence
According to Cisco’s 2017 Annual Cybersecurity Report, only one in 5,000 user activities (0.02
percent) connected with third-party cloud applications is suspicious. The challenge for security
teams is to pinpoint that one instance. Only with automation can security teams cut through the
noise of security alerts and focus their resources on investigating true threats. The multistage
process of identifying normal and potentially suspicious user activities hinges on the use of
automation, with algorithms applied at every stage (see figure 29).
AI and machine learning have the power to disrupt the industry. Security leaders should explore
innovative technologies that turn defenses into learning systems. Unsupervisedmachine-learning
approaches, such as those focused on user and entity behavior analytics, work at the intersection
of human behavior and big data analytics. Solutions should focus on removing people from the
Figure
Identifying user patterns with automation
All user behavior
Anomalies
Suspicious activities
. % of all activities
%abnormal
behavior
% login activities
%administrative
actions
billion user
activities permonth
X> than average
login failures
X> than average
ile downloads
X> than average
data asset deletion
Cyber research
Community intelligence
Centralized policies
Contextual analysis
Cloud vulnerability insight
Threat intelligence
True threat
Source: A.T. Kearney analysis