Cybercriminals are collaborating to refine their attacks and businesses must do the same by leveraging a growing body of open-source security tools, a security expert has advised as open-source machine learning puts the technology into the mainstream. Mainstream adoption of machine-learning techniques has become crucial for businesses that are being inundated with security-related data and are well past the hope of having humans – or security information and management (SIEM) platforms – keep up with the flood, Cloudera chief security architect Eddie Garcia recently told CSO Australia. "The machine learning part makes a huge difference," he said. "Whereas before SIEM technology searched for known patterns like DDoS or brute-force attacks, machine learning recognises a baseline of what normal activity is, and uses this to recognise anomalies." Machine-learning techniques exploded into the mainstream during 2016, with the launch of the Intel-Cloudera based Apache Spot platform http://spot.incubator.apache.org a turning point in the adoption of machine-learning techniques to security analytics.