It’s one thing to guard against a cyber break-in once a week or perhaps a few times a month. But what if there were millions of such attacks every minute of the day?

This is the scale at which organizations such as FortiGuard Labs must operate, using technology and tools against some of the most sophisticated threat actors in the world.

“We’re the ones fighting cybercrime on the back end 24/7, 365 on a per-second basis,” said Derek Manky (pictured), chief of security insights and global threat alliances at FortiGuard Labs. “There’s over 10 million attacks we’re processing per minute, over 100 billion events every day that we have to sift through. You need intelligence to be able to detect, to protect, and also to respond.”

Manky spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the RSA Conference in San Francisco. They discussed findings from the company’s latest threat report and how artificial intelligence can help analyze and fix vulnerabilities.

Focus on higher value

FortiGuard Lab’s most recent “Global Threat Landscape Report” from Q4 2019 highlighted a number of trends the company’s analysts are seeing in the cybersecurity community. These included rising security risks for internet of things devices, the discovery of new malware versions that can move rapidly across networks, and a preference among criminals for higher value targets.

“We’ve seen this shift or evolution for ransomware from day to day to going after targeted accounts, high revenue business streams,” Manky said. “Low volume, high risk, that’s a trend we’re seeing as well.”

To combat the rising tide of threats and vulnerabilities documented in FortiGuard Labs’ latest report, the company is increasingly relying on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Earlier this week, Fortinet introduced a self-learning appliance that leverages deep neural networks for automated threat detection and remediation.

“We launched a FortiAI product,” Manky said. “This is an on-premises appliance built off five-plus years of learning that we’ve done in the cloud to be able to identify threats and malware. It’s something that you would typically need four to five headcount in your security operations center to do.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the RSA Conference.

Photo: SiliconANGLE