Page 592 - (ISC)² CISSP Certified Information Systems Security Professional Official Study Guide

warehouses contain large amounts of potentially sensitive information
vulnerable to aggregation and inference attacks, and security

practitioners must ensure that adequate access controls and other
security measures are in place to safeguard this data. Second, data
mining can actually be used as a security tool when it’s used to develop
baselines for statistical anomaly–based intrusion detection systems.
Data mining is used to “hunt” through large volumes of security-
related data for anomalous events that could indicate an ongoing
attack, compromise, or breach.

Data Analytics

Data analytics is the science of raw data examination with the focus of
extracting useful information out of the bulk information set. The
results of data analytics could focus on important outliers or
exceptions to normal or standard items, a summary of all data items,

or some focused extraction and organization of interesting
information. Data analytics is a growing field as more organizations
are gathering an astounding volume of data from their customers and
products. The sheer volume of information to be processed has
demanded a whole new category of database structures and analysis
tools. It has even picked up the nickname of “big data.”

Big data refers to collections of data that have become so large that

traditional means of analysis or processing are ineffective, inefficient,
and insufficient. Big data involves numerous difficult challenges,
including collection, storage, analysis, mining, transfer, distribution,
and results presentation. Such large volumes of data have the potential
to reveal nuances and idiosyncrasies that more mundane sets of data

fail to address. The potential to learn from big data is tremendous, but
the burdens of dealing with big data are equally great. As the volume
of data increases, the complexity of data analysis increases as well. Big
data analysis requires high-performance analytics running on
massively parallel or distributed processing systems. With regard to
security, organizations are endeavoring to collect an ever more
detailed and exhaustive range of event data and access data. This data
is collected with the goal of assessing compliance, improving

efficiencies, improving productivity, and detecting violations.