The Disciplined Pursuit of Cybersecurity Innovation

 

But that was just the beginning. As cyberattacks grew in complexity and frequency, so did the industry’s response. The industry developed multi-factor authentication, intrusion detection systems, and comprehensive encryption techniques. Today, we are on the brink of a new cybersecurity era, powered by AI and machine learning. These technologies allow cybersecurity professionals to predict, detect, and neutralise threats in real time—a departure from traditional reactive security measures. 

 

The integration of AI into cybersecurity tools not only enhances effectiveness but also revolutionises the approach to defence. Innovation is a critical piece of corporate success. At Ensign InfoSecurity, our approach is to keep our feet on the innovation pedal to drive progress, much like the evolutionary paths of other cutting-edge industries.  

 

Evolution of Email Communication 

 

From foot messengers to instant messaging, innovation has propelled advances in communication over centuries. Email exemplifies this evolution, graduating from clunky early systems of the 1970s running on ARPANET, a forerunner of the internet, to user-friendly webmail in the 1990s accessed via web browsers.  

 

Webmail however, had slow interfaces where every action by the user required the server to reload the entire webpage.  A Google engineer was tasked with developing a new email product that would be faster and had more features. The result was Gmail which was launched in 2004. It revolutionised email with its massive storage – which allowed users to keep their emails forever - powerful search capabilities and a slick interface. 

 

Today, there are over 1.8 billion Gmail users worldwide, sending and receiving some 300 billion emails daily, all of which make up nearly a third of global email traffic. What began as an innovative idea now buttresses Google's revenue-generating Workspace business.  

 

But innovation often arises serendipitously, as with 3M's accidental creation of a feeble adhesive that sat idly until its potential as the reusable, sticky notes became the Post-it note — a billion-dollar business for 3M — was identified. 

 

Many scientific breakthroughs emerge from a desire to do better or from curiosity-driven research without initial commercial motives. Yet corporations are reluctant to fund curiosity-driven open-ended work unless it aligns with market opportunities. Innovative firms strive to balance “blue sky” research with commercial strategy, but profit motives can constrain unfettered inquiry. 

 

Balancing Incremental and Disruptive Innovation 

 

Focusing on incremental innovation ensures steady progress. It involves refining existing products and services, improving efficiency, and optimising processes. This approach delivers tangible results quickly, boosting profitability and customer satisfaction.   

 

Disruptive innovation, on the other hand, involves introducing entirely new solutions, services, or business models that revolutionise the market.  Think of how ride-sharing apps disrupted the traditional taxi industry, or how streaming services transformed the way people consume entertainment. 

 

Companies need to invest in both approaches. Incremental improvements provide a steady stream of wins, keeping employees engaged and motivated. Disruptive innovation ensures an enterprise is prepared for the future and more importantly, for the unforeseen. By constantly exploring new horizons, enterprises can identify and capitalise on emerging trends before they become mainstream. 

 

The key to success lies in striking a balance between these two approaches, allowing companies to experiment with new ideas without jeopardising their core business. Further, there must be alignment with business goals and a fostering a culture of creativity. 

 

To ensure that research does lead to commercialisation, it is critical that innovation must be purposeful and systematic. Peter Drucker, the renowned management consultant, asserted that innovation is not a random act or flash of genius, but “a purposeful and systematic process that demands diligent work, analysis and hard effort”.  

 

In his essay, The Discipline of Innovation, enterprises need to analyse opportunities, understand customer needs, and have a clear focus in their innovation strategy.  Crucially, it must be coupled with diligent execution to translate ideas into value-creating products, services or processes. 

 

Turbocharging Cybersecurity Breakthroughs   

 

Companies have different ways to encourage innovation. The most well-known is the personal time given to employees to chase rainbows and hatch their own ideas. Google and 3M offer 20 per cent and 15 per cent personal time respectively for their staff to work on their own research projects. Beyond this, both companies maintain a systematic and rigorous process to select and sharpen ground-up innovations and shepherd them to commercial products.   

 

At Ensign InfoSecurity, our approach harnesses researchers and engineers’ discontent with the status quo and restless curiosity with customer feedback. We channel frustration over rising, seemingly unsolvable cyber challenges and incidents into action by posing provocative questions during regular brainstorms to identify idea threads. 

 

Can an incident responder, whose task is to isolate and prevent an attack from spreading, handle 1,000 incidents at the same time? 

 

It may be a preposterous question — an incident responder can typically handle just two to four attacks — but this query will spur a pursuit of massive productivity gains and efficiency.  

 

Another example: the pernicious threat of deepfakes, where Generative AI allows digitally altered faces and voices to spread misinformation. Is there a tool to prevent this? 

 

Different nuggets of ideas will emerge from this prodding. It is important to prioritise them. Our R&D team tackled the deepfake problem because it had wide social impact. They could manipulate public opinion and erode trust in public institutions as well as other organisations. Deepfakes can also be exploited to carry out fraud and scams, a deep concern for governments across the world.  

 

The first step the R&D team took was to understand how deepfakes worked, creating their own versions to find vulnerabilities. With this knowledge, they developed sophisticated detection mechanisms scanning emails, URLs, and subtle site variations.  

 

The result is a phishing and deepfake detection solution, an AI machine learning system which analyses and flags email addresses, and embedded URLs mimicking legitimate domains. It can also detect subtle alterations, misspellings and homoglyph attacks using similar characters — all tactics to deceive email recipients. Based on generative adversarial neural networks, image recognition algorithms and behavioural analysis, our tests show that the detection rate exceeds 90 per cent.  

 

Our aim is to enable users to easily identify the red flags and alerts. It will also bolster our clients' cyber defences and hopefully increase our revenues. 

 

Ideas alone mean little if they are not translated into concrete solutions and they should aim to be better, cheaper and quicker to deploy.  

 

Like Gmail, our phishing and deepfake detection solution represents a significant innovation and a substantial improvement over existing tools. Now fully launched and available in the market, this solution is designed for ease of use, enabling quick adoption and equipping organisations with advanced defences against these sophisticated threats. 

 

Ensign’s innovation efforts have resulted in three key patents focused on its AI-powered cyber analytics which benefitted our clients and our financial performance. As with Gmail and the sticky 3M Post-It pads, the Google and 3M’s innovators leveraged their domain knowledge to create ground breaking solutions and products. Ensign similarly believes harnessing specialised expertise is the key to unlocking corporate innovation.  Our approach is to understand our industry, market and customer needs while leveraging in-house strengths.  

 

We believe disciplined innovation is the way forward. It is a potent growth catalyst for creating safer and more secure outcomes and a stronger bottom line.