Elemendar News – Issue 15

October brings hot, spring sunshine to Australia and golden leaves across the Northern Hemisphere, with all of us working through this ongoing pandemic. We hope you and yours are all OK.

This month’s interesting article talks about the “allure of novel threats” and the risk of “snobby isolationism” in regard to cyber threat intel groups and some analysts. If we can move past being insulted as potentially snobby, the premise that experts are more interested in discovering rare or new attacks rather than crunching through all the boring stuff is a real, human and understandable problem. https://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/cyber-intelligence-suffers-from-snobby-isolationism-focus-on-rare-threats/d/d-id/1339108

It’s natural to seek the interesting. After all, if you were a self-respecting palaeontologist spending days scraping at the ground, you’d want to discover the biggest ever T-Rex or maybe the first preserved dinosaur butt fossil. Yet another week of turning up hundreds of ammonites (or as an analyst, manually labelling hundreds of already known indicators) would hardly get you on the front of National Geographic and an invite to the Explorers Club (you could buy a new hat!). But actually, most of our work with CTI is analogous to staring at yet another bunch of ammonites. And someone needs to do it, all the time.

So how do we improve the situation? CISOs tell us that one of the major problems they have is analyst burnout. We all go code blind from time to time. So we say automate the drudgery because that’s easier for machines and let the humans do the more interesting stuff: looking for new things, building fire breaks rather than fire fighting, and hoping for that invite to speak at the Explorers Club. Letting Elemendar’s AI read the CTI first is analogous to automating the ammonites. Quicker, safer, easier and cheaper. So please get in touch to learn more about how our AI can help you.

Our news

We are delighted to announce that UK public services can now more easily order our AI Analyst, as we have been accepted into the UK Government’s Digital Marketplace (G-Cloud). This was the good news I couldn’t mention last month as the announcement was embargoed. See our entry:
https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/g-cloud/services/149943948306642

Giorgos (our Co-founder and CEO) presented at the Danish chapter of the Information Security Forum (virtually of course) on why we have developed our AI to read (and write) CTI and what we’ve learned from doing so. Check out this article compiled from the talk: //elemendar-uat.mytimpani.co.uk/training-ai-to-read-threat-intellegnce/

Do you know anyone looking for work? Many of us have friends or know others in industries that are suffering badly due to the pandemic. Some of them are asking how to retrain to get into software development or cyber, so perhaps share this article with them? Syra has written a helpful introduction on where to start, channelling the “Fatima’s next job could be in cyber” memes. //elemendar-uat.mytimpani.co.uk/could-your-next-job-be-in-cyber/

That’s all from me from this month.

Keep well, and good luck

-Tristan