Head of Security Analytics Eduardo Bárbaro 

“First of all: I’m really happy that Black Hat selected us back as a speaker,” Eduardo says. “Black Hat is a flagship conference, and this is great recognition for ING and the work we do in the intersection between analytics and cybersecurity. This year, we’ve decided to cover our entire security analytics portfolio to help the audience understand how we solve this complicated puzzle.”

And it is indeed a puzzle, he explains: “Both analytics and cyber security are very difficult topics on their own, so combining them is an even tougher challenge. Our success is largely thanks to my analytics team being able to work closely together with our specialist colleagues in CISO. We put much effort into speaking each other’s language and teamed up throughout the entire process. This enabled us to integrate analytics into CISO’s security work so our colleagues can work not only faster but more accurately. Meanwhile, my team learnt a lot about the technical aspects of cyber security, resulting in increasingly better use cases. We are now laying a strong foundation for even further collaboration. The results speak for themselves and should convince any remaining sceptics.”

At the Black Hat conference, Eduardo will talk about several use cases that his team has collaborated on with other CISO colleagues. These include identity and access management – for which Eduardo and his fellow speaker, Senior Data Scientist Roberto Moratore, developed a fast and effective new solution. Other topics include the role of analytics education within CISO and the use of AI for secure software development life cycle (SDLC). Especially in SDLC, Eduardo’s team is further improving upon existing market tooling, with the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning developed in-house, to ensure ING’s code repositories are safe.

“I find it important to show how we dare to put proofs-of-concepts into production at ING – even in such a complex domain as cyber security. Not everything is 100% successful all the time, but rather than getting demotivated if things don’t immediately turn out as we hoped, we learn from it and build upon it. This approach is widely supported and embraced within ING on all levels. So, at the conference, we’ll not only share the technical aspects of infusing data analytics into cyber security but also talk about the soft skills needed to make things work when you bring together two already complex domains.”