For years, every time I’ve told someone I work at FICO, their first response has been, “FICO? The credit score company?” And I say “yes,” although I am focused on other parts of the business such as fraud detection, network continuity assurance, marketing predictions and many more.
But creation of predictive scores? That’s where FICO’s predictive analytics excel. We recently announced a new domain that will benefit from our scoring expertise: cybersecurity, teaming with iboss Cybersecurity.
Our partnership will bring FICO artificial intelligence (AI) analytics to the iboss web security platform, creating the first cyber threat score that measures the likelihood of malware infection, phishing attacks, insider threats and data breaches. Through the cyber threat scores, FICO and iboss customers will now be able to more accurately quantify cyber threats and remediate them in real-time, to stop catastrophic infection and data loss before it occurs.
Quantifying threats is an enormous breakthrough, helping enterprises to better distinguish genuine threats from the millions (literally) of false cyber alarms they are burdened with each year. This will yield faster time to detection, which is the real end game here. From The Wall Street Journal:
"Recent data from Verizon’s 2016 Data Breach Investigations Report suggests, however, that companies are taking longer to detect breaches and more of them rely on external parties to notify them of these breaches. 'Criminals are getting better and faster and those on the defensive are not able to keep up,' Bryan Sartin, executive director of global security solutions for Verizon Enterprise Solutions told CIO Journal."
Quickly detecting malware and ransomware
FICO and iboss Cybersecurity aim to dramatically reduce the “dwell time” — the time it takes to detect an advanced threat once it has breached an organization’s infrastructure. Data is frequently stolen within minutes or hours after penetration. Echoing the Verizon data breach report, a 2015 study by Ponemon Institute found that the average time taken to detect an advanced threat was 98 days for retailers and 196.5 days — more than six months — for financial services institutions.
What’s more, the FICO and iboss combined technologies can quickly spot malware other systems miss. This includes attacks that mask communication using TOR software, such as the Zeus64 malware trojan and Locky ransomware.
How scoring works
FICO’s patented behavioral analytics identify anomalous activity within milliseconds, using real-time transaction profiling and self-learning models. These analytics will score suspicious “behavior” of devices, users or servers. This is similar to the way the FICO® Falcon® Platform, the leading card fraud solution, instantly scores billions of credit card transactions around the world daily. The Falcon platform has been protecting the global payment card infrastructure for more 20 years.
You can learn more about the FICO Cybersecurity Score here.
And follow me on Twitter @ScottZoldi, where I’ll be talking lots about cybersecurity in the coming weeks. Thanks!
