Hackers breached the popular web forum XKCD, stealing 560,000 usernames and emails and passwords. Providence Health Plan notified 122,000 members that their personal information may have been compromised in a security breach. And Telextext Holidays, a British travel firm, discovered that over half a million customer files may have been exposed in a data attack.

What do these incidents have in common? They were all reported just in the last three days.

“As an industry, we have to ask ourselves why these damaging breaches continue to happen,” said Dave Martin (pictured), senior director of product management at Open Systems AG. “There’s over a hundred billion dollars per year, as an industry, spent on security and secure-related software and yet these damaging breaches continue to occur. The best way to minimize risk is to combine those types of technologies with continuous monitoring.”

Martin spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, at SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed how continuous monitoring can be applied across the infrastructure and the importance of keeping humans in the loop when relying on artificial intelligence tools (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Detecting cloud-based threats

Open Systems is a global provider of secure SD-WAN solutions. Continuous monitoring allows users to oversee the entire compute infrastructure, including cloud operations.

“All of these cloud vendors have administrative APIs, and you can certainly monitor who’s accessing the cloud,” Martin said. “You can look for signs that the infrastructure may have been compromised, instances stopping and starting, certificates that may have been uploaded.”

Open Systems’ services include a security operations center to provide access to expert-level engineers and AI-powered incident response. The company uses AI and machine-learning tools, but it is also careful to note that humans remain involved.

“Certainly, there’s a legitimate technology there, but we are in this hype cycle where there’s an over-promise of what it can deliver,” Martin said. “In a security context, techniques like machine learning and AI can be used to reduce noise and amplify signal. The mistake that a lot of people make is to take the human out of the equation.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Open Systems AG sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Open Systems nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE