Brian Roth
Director of SLED sales,
SlashNext
AI-Powered Email Monitoring Enables SOC Students to Improve Campus Security
Friday, May 03, 2024 | 10:15AM–11:00AM CT | Exhibit Hall, First Floor
Session Type:
Poster Session
Delivery Format:
Poster
The California Polytechnic State University’s Security Operations Center was drowning in abuse email reviews; 75% to 80% of our SOC staff’s time was spent addressing emails reported by our end users. Why spend so much time reviewing emails? According to the FBI Internet Crime Report, Business Email Compromise resulted in $2.7B in losses in 2022, and 91% of successful cyber breaches start with a phishing attack. According to SlashNext in the Top 10 AI Security Stories of 2023, “phishing increased 1,265% in 2023.” When our students are done dealing with email alerts during their shifts, the remainder of their time is spent addressing SIEM alerts and other tasks as assigned. We were intrigued when we learned of SlashNext in early 2023 and its capabilities, leading us to set up a 14-day proof of value journey that turned into a deployment. We will dive into our experience and the decisions we made along the way and share what was found at various checkpoints during the POV. Cal Poly San Luis Obispo was the first public university to work with SlashNext. We’ll share how the implementation went and the novel approach used to assess student email use compared to staff/faculty’s normal use. We will dive into the other tasks the students work on in our SOC. With a reduction in abuse email reviews by nearly 80%, we now assign projects to our students during the school year, directly contributing to our campus security posture.
