Cybercrime poses a large and growing threat to organizations around the world, but most organizations are unequipped to face it. The Center for Cyber Safety and Education estimates that by 2022, there will be 1.8 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs—a number that may only rise given the prevalence of burnout within the cybersecurity workforce.
A recent study, for example, found that almost two-thirds of cybersecurity professionals have considered quitting their jobs or leaving the industry entirely. And separately, Dark Reading reported that 60% of survey respondents were either “absolutely fried” or “pretty well done” from stress and overwork.
As more devices join the Internet of Things and as cyberattacks grow in sophistication and scope, the importance of a strong cybersecurity workforce grows in tandem. That means addressing burnout but also mitigating the labor shortage and the near constant attacks that created this problem in the first place. These are prerequisites for successfully implementing IoT and reaping its vast economic potential.
At BlackBerry, our main goal is to secure the Internet of Things. It’s why we’ve built strong security solutions like BlackBerry Intelligent Security, BlackBerry Workspaces and CylancePROTECT. Together, these products take a multi-pronged approach to alleviating the cyber skills gap and treating professional burnout.
First, BlackBerry Intelligent Security and BlackBerry Workspaces address risks from human error and negligence, removing a significant and unnecessary stressor on security teams. Second, CylancePROTECT eliminates the threat from more sophisticated cyberattacks through artificial intelligence-boosted capabilities. And third, all three solutions come together to provide cybersecurity teams simple, effective response mechanisms in the event of a breach, ensuring an isolated incident does not become a system-wide emergency.
Preventing Human Error
The reality is, many security incidents are the result of poor cyber hygiene and nothing more. That includes weak passwords, insecure file sharing and basic phishing schemes—all of which can be addressed by readily available technologies.
Take weak passwords, for instance. A report from Verizon found that an astonishing 80% of hacking-related breaches leveraged either stolen and/or weak passwords. That should come as no surprise when over 70% of employees reuse the same password at work. Although you may think such issues are addressable only to the extent that individuals follow password best practices, tools like BlackBerry Intelligent Security can account for incautious, absent-minded employees. Through adaptive endpoint protection and contextual endpoint management, BlackBerry Intelligent Security prevents unauthorized access even if the password provided is correct. That mitigates the human factor and hardens your endpoint and identity posture.
This idea—using tech to diminish human error—is also behind BlackBerry Workspaces, our content collaboration platform. By making it easy to follow cybersecurity best practices (e.g. by encrypting all files automatically within Workspaces), we thwart some of the most basic risks from becoming incidents. In doing so, we prevent simple yet exhausting threats from weighing down the shoulders of your security team.
Responding to Sophisticated Threats
However, other attacks rise well above the level of the events described above. That’s where our advanced AI-driven CylancePROTECT platform can augment your existing forces.
CylancePROTECT works by utilizing AI-driven predictive capabilities to catch and prevent cyber intrusions before they become consequential. That’s critical because malware is increasingly able to mutate on a daily basis, rendering traditional signature-based tools obsolete. CylancePROTECT guards against known and unknown malware, fileless attacks and zero-day payload executions, providing a proactive approach that removes the stress of daily fire drills and breaches. In fact, your employees may not even notice CylancePROTECT in action at all.
Of course, that’s entirely the point. Forrester Research found that CylancePROTECT reduced the possibility of a data breach by almost 99% for one state county government, saving them $2.3 million annually and enabling their security employees to be 40% more productive. That’s the multiplier effect BlackBerry Cylance products provide.
Simplifying Remediation
Just as important as prevention is remediation. No cybersecurity team—augmented or not—can protect against every cyberattack. That’s why we provide the tools to quickly, simply and effectively respond to successful intrusions, so that one stolen record or unauthorized access request does not balloon into a large and costly scandal.
Our approach starts with unparalleled visibility into security incidents and extends into automated remediation tools. With Workspaces, that means a Ransomware Recovery process that prevents infected files from spreading to other workspaces. And for BlackBerry Intelligent Security and CylancePROTECT, that means the use of automation to quickly respond to cyber intrusions.
If BlackBerry Intelligent Security, for example, detects a combination of IP address, location and time that isn’t possible based on an employee’s last authenticated access, it immediately denies access, forces a logout, adds the IP address to a watchlist and alerts the cybersecurity team of a high-risk event. Similarly, when CylancePROTECT identifies malicious use of memory (fileless attacks), it activates immediate automated prevention responses.
What binds these solutions together is the smart use of technology to alleviate pressure on overworked cybersecurity professionals. By eliminating threats before they appear and by simplifying remediation when attacks do break through, BlackBerry’s AI-driven technologies respond in real-time, circumventing the need for security teams to constantly monitor and defend against the endless stream of cyber assaults—an exhausting, impossible task. That gives them time to focus on creative information gathering and the learning of new defense and remediation strategies.
This latter part greatly helps prevent burnout. Cybersecurity professionals know just how important their job is and want the tools to effectively perform it. By giving them solutions that prevent the preventable and respond effectively to the unavoidable, an enterprise can fortify its cyber defenses while taking care of its workforce in the process.