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Cybercrime is forecast to cost organizations globally nearly $11 trillion by 2025. Threat actors need only to find one vulnerability in an organization’s systems that may span across any of the potential attack surfaces, anywhere from the application, network, and physical layers. Traditional reactive approaches to mitigating cyberthreats are no longer viable.
Process mining is a cutting-edge technology that has the potential to revolutionize the way organizations manage and improve their business processes.
By automating the collection and analysis of process data, process mining provides organizations with an unprecedented level of visibility into their operations, enabling them to optimize process efficiency and effectiveness, and help prevent cyber threats.
“By 2025, 80 percent of organizations driven by the expectations of cost reduction and automation-derived enhanced process efficiency will embed process mining capabilities in at least 10 percent of their business operations.”
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Process Mining Tools, 20 March 2023
A particularly helpful application of process mining is surfacing, analyzing, and remediating potential cyberthreats. Cybercrime is forecast to cost organizations globally nearly $11 trillion by 2025. Threat actors need only to find one vulnerability in an organization’s systems that may span across any of the potential attack surfaces, anywhere from the application, network, and physical layers. Traditional reactive approaches to mitigating cyberthreats are no longer viable. What is needed is a more granular, proactive, and adaptive approach that anticipates how threat actors expose and take advantage of system vulnerabilities.
Process mining provides Cyber Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs) with data-driven compliance analysis and auditing of prescribed threat response management processes based on event log data collected from multiple systems. It enables CSIRTs to surface potential compliance gaps (e.g., cybersecurity governance and risk management processes) and to identify and remediate deviations (e.g., incident response management processes across multiple cases, adherence to response and resolution times, and surface outliers).
Process mining is complementary to cybersecurity applications that guard against vulnerabilities across multiple attack surfaces (application, presentation, session, transport, network, data, and physical layers) and types of attacks (spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, and elevation of privilege).
Process mining enables cybersecurity teams to discover the current state of cybersecurity process behaviors, continuously monitor compliance processes, and alert teams in the event of deviations from prescribed processes. By doing so, process mining provides cybersecurity teams with granular visibility to areas where cybersecurity vulnerabilities may be improved.
Another application of process mining is to simulate the impact of cyberthreats and identify where possible weaknesses exist, facilitating planning for additional investments and resources that prevent cyberthreats. Process mining can detect when a process is executing in an unexpected or unusual manner, indicating that it may have been impacted by a ransomware attack. Similarly, it can also identify when an application is using excessive resources, suggesting that it may be running malicious code.
Process mining may also be effectively deployed to analyze data breach response readiness. On average, it takes organizations 280 days to identify and remediate a data breach incident. By analyzing data breach response event logs, compliance teams can gain granular insight into potential gaps in breach response policies, lapses in potential compliance protocol violations, and resource allocation inefficiencies.
Process mining is a valuable tool in the fight against cyber threats. Its ability to provide a clear and comprehensive picture of an organization's processes, as well as its ability to detect anomalies and deviations, makes it an effective tool for detecting and preventing ransomware and other forms of cyberattacks. By incorporating process mining into their cyber security strategy, organizations can stay ahead of the threat, protect their systems and data, and maintain the trust of their customers.
Andrew Pery
Digital transformation expert and AI Ethics Evangelist for ABBYY
Andrew Pery is an AI Ethics Evangelist at intelligent automation company ABBYY. His expertise is in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, application software, data privacy and AI ethics. He has written and presented several papers on the ethical use of AI and is currently co-authoring a book for the American Bar Association. He holds a Masters of Law degree with Distinction from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and is a Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP/C), (CIPP/E) and a Certified Information Professional (CIP/AIIM).
Connect with Andrew on LinkedIn.
