For a stronger and more effective cybersecurity strategy, you may want to take advantage of data enrichment. Many businesses now include data enrichment as part of their overall cybersecurity strategy. They still use traditional methods to identify and prevent cyber threats. With data enrichment, though, they are better protected against cyber threats.

Data Enrichment Defined

Data enrichment is the process of supplementing existing data with new data. The new data “enriches” the existing data. Data enrichment is commonly used for marketing purposes. Business-to-business (B2B) service providers, for instance, will often harvest new data about prospective customers to enhance their existing data. But data enrichment isn’t limited to B2B marketing. You can use data enrichment for cybersecurity purposes as well.

Threat Detection

You can use data enrichment to detect cyber threats. Threat detection encompasses apps, tools and software that specifically look for potential threats on a computer or network. Most forms of threat detection involve the use of data. And you can enhance this data with new data.

DDoS Protection

Another cybersecurity-related application for data enrichment is distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection. DDoS attacks can overwhelm your business’s network. They will consume bandwidth and system resources while causing performance issues such as slow speeds or frequent disconnects.

All DDoS attacks involve traffic from a variety of devices. The devices are typically hijacked by a hacker and then used to carry out the DDoS attack on a network. With data enrichment, you can distinguish between legitimate devices and hijacked, DDoS-programmed devices more easily. Data enrichment can help you protect your business’s network from DDoS attacks.

Identify Malware

Failure to identify malware in a timely manner could spell disaster for your business’s information technology (IT) infrastructure. Depending on the type of malware, it may delete storage drives, lock your files or perform other malicious activities. Data enrichment, however, can help you identify malware.

Different forms of malware have different signatures. A signature is a digital footprint. When you install antivirus software on your computer, it will look for known signatures. But antivirus software is only effective if it knows the signature of the malware that’s infected your computer. Data enrichment, though, can add new signatures to the antivirus software’s database.

In Conclusion

Data enrichment is a relatively new trend in cybersecurity, It involves the use of new data with which to supplement existing data. Including data enrichment in your cybersecurity strategy will provide greater threat detection, DDoS protection and malware identification.