Special Report: The Big Data Intelligence Conference

Special Report: The Big Data Intelligence Conference

This post is also available in: heעברית (Hebrew)

The Big Data Intelligence Conference
The Big Data Intelligence Conference

The idea is simple: The data is out there, in the virtual world. The challenge collecting the data, understanding it and sharing it with the right people as efficiently as possible. That is the idea behind the concept of big data. The Big Data Conference, taking place today in Herzliya, Israel, focuses on these issues. The event was organized by the iHLS news website.

In his opening address, cyber expert Joey Peleg said: “The amounts of information generated today is so massive that normal technologies can’t process it all. Information is only valuable when you can use it to make decisions, so the issues of data collection, processing, analysis and dissemination are extremely important.”

Dr. Nisan Maskil, from IAI’s Elta division, provided some solutions. “There are many similarities between cyber-security techniques and electronic warfare. In both areas intelligence – either cyber or electronic – is collected, and must be analyzed in order to be useful,” said Maskil. Both areas saw significant technological improvements over the last few years. Today a military commander gets visual data in real time, for example, but the question is whether he can make real-time decisions based on that data. “Big data is all about storing and processing information. From a cyber viewpoint producing one tiny shred of information from a huge database is the equivalent of collecting intelligence in the physical or electronic worlds. It gives us the ability to detect attacks before they occur, the ability to prepare ourselves and the ability to launch cyber attacks of our own.”

NICE’s Yaron Tchewella told the conference attendees that NICE was involved with security at the Superbowl last week, security at the Sochi Winter Olympics and with other global mega-events. Tchewella described the main global threats existing today:

  • Terror. The bad guys are getting more and more sophisticated.
  • Globalization. Borders are becoming virtual. It’s very easy, relatively speaking, to transfer technologies. A major headache for intelligence services.
  • Civil unrest and social protests.
  • Cyber crime.
  • The mobile world. Intelligence has to monitor information transferred between billions of smartphones.

IHLS – Israel Homeland Security

 Joey Peleg
Joey Peleg

According to Yaron Tchewella the correct way of dealing with the unimaginable mass of data is by capturing information, reprocessing it, analyzing voice or text and reaching conclusions. By analyzing the phone calls of a suspect – identifying words, assessing age, gender – you can know more about her, crosschecking pieces of information to form an accurate suspect profile. In this way, for example, pedophiles can be located and stopped.

Dr. Nimrod Kozlovski from JVP Cyber Labs reviewed the modern methods of cyber attack. Modern attacks are targeted and precise, well researched and designed to infiltrate specific organizations. Hackers are not children testing cyber-toys, they are well funded organizations, criminal or even governmental, capable of launching wide-scale attacks targeting the largest global institutions.

Dr. Kozlovski concluded that traditional methods of information security are no longer suited to modern cyber warfare. Perimeter defense and protecting assets are no longer enough. Today there must be constant monitoring, profiling and detection of abnormal behavior. New software and systems must be developed in order to counter the incredible ease of writing malicious code. As cyber attackers have a significant advantage compared to cyber defenders, cyber defense has to be based on prevention: collecting intelligence, analyzing it, developing the proper tools – rather than reacting to attacks defenders have to prevent them before they occur.

According to Dr. Kozlovski Israel is one of the most advanced countries is the world in this area, since the country based its military and intelligence systems on the modern era’s most prevalent security concept: Storing information, processing it, analyzing it and disseminating it.

Photos: Coming Up.