Startup Uses ‘Natural Language Processing’ to Help Security Teams

The San Francisco, Calif.-based Insight Engines is enabling security teams to collect meaningful insights from data using natural language processing, machine learning and expertise to detect information gaps, ask relevant questions and provide recommendations.

The data science startup’s launch of the company’s version 3.0 product combines two key components, Insight Investigator and Insight Analyzer, to provide a more proactive, creative and effective information security environment.

“Security teams are mired in systems and approaches that are holding them back from being as effective as they want to be,” Grant Wernick, CEO of Insight Engines, said. “Companies are throwing a tremendous amount of money at the problem, yet virtually nothing has changed since the Equifax breach a year ago. We have to completely change the game by using machine learning to amplify human intelligence (i.e. knowledge, intuition and creativity) in investigating and mitigating threats.”

Insight Engines’ latest product offerings, Insight Investigator and Insight Analyzer, does three things to solve key problems, Wernick explained:

• Organizes unsystematic “landfills” of log data by rendering invisible or obscured data open and transparent, helping analysts know exactly what they have – and don’t have – in their logs.
• Maximizes security teams’ capabilities. The modules permit anyone in an organization, not just the highly-specialized technicians who are in short supply, to ask questions of their data and receive timely answers.
• Supplements human intelligence to help analysts ask better questions. The NLP system analyzes and distills industry trends and activities to provide smart recommendations for questions and deeper investigation paths.

Insight Engines’ new product architecture aims to provide its customers the best of both worlds: On-premise security with cloud-enabled intelligence. Insight Investigator uses patented NLP technology so security analysts of all skill levels can ask questions of their machine data using an English language search instead of learning highly-specialized and complex query languages. Insight Analyzer enables customers to understand what data they have, how it’s organized, and what questions that data can and cannot answer. Insight Investigator and Insight Analyzer are sold as a package.

“We are able to translate human language into database queries,” Wernick explained. He added Insight Engines is introducing that to a world where there’s a lot real pain concerning security and where people have real dollars on the line. They have people trying to investigate cybercrime. The suite of tools allows users to type in things like, “Hey, have we seen anybody from China today?” or “Have we sent any data to China today versus the last 30 days?”

Wernick noted, “With our engine you literally asked those queries in seconds so people now can become security and IT experts and they don’t have to become technicians.” Organizations can simply ask questions about the data instead of crafting queries that take weeks, he added. “And so now the financial institutions that utilize our products can get a lot more done in a much shorter period.

Insight Engines indicated its approach has already proven successful with financial institutions, some Fortune 500 companies as well as major government organizations, helping them unlock the value of their data and empowering their teams to be more insightful, inquisitive, productive and creative.

Among the financial institutions already using Insight Engines NLP products are a handful of credit unions, a larger number of banks and even some mortgage loan operations. Wernick said, “I would like to do more with credit unions because credit unions have a much harder time than the big banks in getting the right kind of talent. I think our product really helps credit unions.”