Keith Alexander, a retired U.S. Army general and founder, chairman and co-CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity, said the concept of collective defense against cyberthreats involves the use of behavioral analytics to detect beaconing, lateral movement, command and control and other types of behaviors and adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning to speed up threat detection.
“So those behavioral analytics look at behaviors as a machine learning and AI to rate every one of those behaviors,” Alexander, a previous Wash100 Award winner, told Washington Post Live in an interview published Monday.
“And then as you noted, we anonymize that information so it can be shared, both among companies and with the government. That’s a huge step in cybersecurity,” he added. Alexander addressed privacy concerns when it comes to data sharing.
“So when you think about it, we’re talking about beaconing traffic, we’re talking about things the adversary’s doing, and sharing threat-related data,” he noted. “We don’t want to look at the communications, but we want to help them see the behaviors of things that are going on, and share those that in a metadata form.”
The retired general also discussed the role of cloud in collective defense and shared his insights on ransomware and 5G technology.
