Finding a Needle in a Digital Haystack

[Commentary] Last year the private sector spent $67.2 billion on cybersecurity services. Nevertheless, according to a recent investigation by Verizon, 60 percent of successful hacks were not detected until months after the attacks began. In the wake of recent high-profile hacker attacks against Target, Neiman Marcus and other retailers, the obvious question is: Why hasn’t all that money done any good? The problem is that many organizations simply don’t know how to arrange the data to identify suspicious patterns and weaknesses, at least not fast enough. There’s too much data, and not enough perspective. What we need, then, is not necessarily more money or information, but a better way of knowing what it means -- of interpreting the data to discover an unknown attack as it happens or, even better, anticipate the next attack.

[White is the global head of government and intelligence for YarcData, a data analytics firm.]