We’re all at risk.

The cybersecurity threat landscape is becoming more complex. The

always-on nature of cybercrime is straining security personnel. And there’s a large and growing shortage of cybersecurity talent.

“It doesn’t stop – ever,” said Juniper Networks Cybersecurity Strategist Nick Bilogorskiy. “And it’s almost impossible to stop an event.”

The question isn’t whether you’ll be the target of hacker. It’s when and where these threats will arise.

So organizations are changing their cybersecurity strategies, said Bilogorskiy, who presented the closing ITEXPO keynote today. The focus used to be on threat prevention, he said. Now it’s on threat identification and mitigation, he explained.

This is all very challeging, of course. And it’s very scary. And time consuming.

The Ponemon Institute estimates that companies get 12,172 cybersecurity alerts a week. Just 518 of those alerts are investigated – in large part due to the significant resources it takes to look into these events. And, Ponemon and Juniper Networks report, businesses waste more than 352 hours weekly chasing false positives.

But there is some good news here, Bilogorskiy indicated. And that is that behavioral analytics can help. Behavioral analytics uses big data collection, and artifical intelligence and machine learning analysis, to correlate data, learn new behaviors, and high anomalies in user behavior and software execution.

That can help organizations better understand where threats are coming from, who and what are the targets, how far into the killchain the hacker was able to penetrate, and more. This kind of intelligence can help people who use patterns to find infected computers and remediate them do their jobs. But that’s just one use case for behavior analytics.

ITEXPO took place this week in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. 

Edited by Mandi Nowitz