Enterprises need to change their approach if they are to beat cyber criminals, according McAfee’s enterprise products head
Cyber defence cannot be effective unless it becomes more automated and proactive, says Raja Patel, vice-president general manager of corporate security products at McAfee
To illustrate the point, he used the Red Queen’s race in Lewis Carroll‘s Through the Looking-Glass, which involves the Red Queen and Alice constantly running, but remaining on the same spot.
The Red Queen tells Alice: “Here, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast.”
Patel told the MPOWER Cybersecurity Summit in Las Vegas: “We are in the same evolutionary race against cyber predators, who are constantly evolving to resist our latest defences.
“We can’t simply change our pace – we have to change the race.” This, he said, is at the heart of McAfee’s drive to enable more proactive cyber defence.
Organisations need to think of their security posture as a lifecycle, of bringing protect, detect and correct together while making sure the environment is able to adapt to the changes yet to come, said Patel.
“It is also becoming evident that the endpoint and cloud are our future control points, and that security operations is the new situation room,” he said.
In the past year, McAfee has applied machine learning, boosted capabilities to detect and respond, enabled greater automation of remediation controls on the endpoint, and improved data loss prevention through closer endpoint-network integration.
