Williams F1 team uses behaviour intelligence technology to get ahead

The explo­sion in enter­prise data, inno­v­a­tive mobil­i­ty solu­tions and the move to cloud-based tech­nolo­gies have made safe­guard­ing sen­si­tive mate­r­i­al an increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult task. Long gone are the days of the tra­di­tion­al secu­ri­ty perime­ter, where fire­walls and intru­sion detec­tion sys­tems were the key con­sid­er­a­tion for chief infor­ma­tion offi­cers (CIOs). These changes have expand­ed the scope of insid­er threats and turned many IT exec­u­tives to user behav­iour intel­li­gence solu­tions to deal with one of the most com­plex chal­lenges of enter­prise secu­ri­ty.

The impor­tance of giv­ing employ­ees wide-rang­ing access to con­fi­den­tial data, while also ensur­ing they do not mis­use it, can­not be over­stat­ed at Williams Mar­ti­ni Rac­ing, a lead­ing For­mu­la 1 team. “For­mu­la 1 is a known quan­ti­ty for us; we have a new car every year and the data after three to four years is not that valu­able any­more, but at Williams we also have our advanced engi­neer­ing com­pa­ny,” says the team’s CIO Graeme Hack­land.

Graeme Hack­land

“The projects that we’re work­ing on in advanced engi­neer­ing and in elec­tric vehi­cle tech­nol­o­gy, sell­ing our exper­tise into some of the biggest OEMs [man­u­fac­tur­ers], is where we’re at the cut­ting edge. It’s real­ly valu­able intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty from our per­spec­tive.”

But it’s also vital to ensure staff are not slowed down and are able to access the data they need, when they want it. “There are a num­ber of peo­ple at Williams who have jobs that require them to copy and move around all types of data,” says Mr Hack­land. “For exam­ple, mem­bers of our mar­ket­ing team will be using videos and pho­tos from every race they are able to, which becomes their nor­mal behav­iour. If they sud­den­ly copied a whole load of aero­dy­nam­ics data that would raise a red flag,” he says.

Soon after Mr Hack­land joined Williams in 2014, the team part­nered with user behav­iour intel­li­gence provider Dtex Sys­tems to get a bet­ter grasp on intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty (IP) pro­tec­tion and imme­di­ate­ly dis­cov­ered two instances of data mis­use, which they were able to address very quick­ly.

“After we sort­ed the ini­tial issues out and ful­ly deployed the tool across all Williams’ machines, we informed our staff at a town hall meet­ing about this new capa­bil­i­ty and why we need­ed it,” says Mr Hack­land.

A total of 11 inves­ti­ga­tions have been com­plet­ed around the mis­use of data, with the infor­ma­tion col­lect­ed from these cas­es shared with every new Williams staff mem­ber to give them insight into the threats the team are fac­ing and under­line the impor­tance of data pro­tec­tion.

“We spent a lot of time talk­ing to staff and mak­ing sure they under­stand the impli­ca­tions if they breach poli­cies, as we real­ly don’t want our peo­ple to do some­thing to con­tra­vene our poli­cies and then run the risk of los­ing them,” he says.

Mr Hack­land explains that most of the inci­dents dis­cov­ered by user behav­iour intel­li­gence tech­nol­o­gy at Williams have been inad­ver­tent. “There are times we have found peo­ple tak­ing data out­side their nor­mal role, but they had a rea­son. They want­ed to do some­thing spe­cif­ic with­out under­stand­ing the risks they were putting them­selves and the com­pa­ny at,” he says.

It’s not just their own pro­pri­etary data that Williams have to secure, as the busi­ness works with some of their cus­tomers’ IP and also joint­ly devel­ops IP. “We have a num­ber of dif­fer­ent chal­lenges com­pared to a reg­u­lar F1 team that might just have this year’s and next year’s F1 car data to pro­tect. Part of our com­pa­ny is also list­ed on the Frank­furt Stock Exchange, so we have some report­ing respon­si­bil­i­ties that most, if not all, the oth­er F1 teams don’t have,” he says.

User behav­iour intel­li­gence tech­nolo­gies work best when human exper­tise plays a key part in dis­cov­er­ing insid­er threats, accord­ing to Mr Hack­land, with Williams hav­ing estab­lished a base­line of nor­mal user behav­iour so the tech­nol­o­gy isn’t return­ing false pos­i­tives.

“We trans­lat­ed our poli­cies to the user behav­iour tech­nol­o­gy to cat­e­gorise what is sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion for us and are only alert­ed when that is moved about. Con­text is added, ask­ing ques­tions such as ‘was that data con­fi­den­tial?’ This has all been ful­ly defined,” he adds.

Com­pa­ny cul­ture is an impor­tant con­cern when try­ing to com­bat insid­er threats. Williams is a fam­i­ly busi­ness, with founder Sir Frank Williams lead­ing the team as prin­ci­pal and his daugh­ter, Claire Williams, sup­port­ing as deputy team prin­ci­pal. When Mr Hack­land looked at user behav­iour and the poten­tial inter­nal user threat, he came from a posi­tion of “trust but ver­i­fy”.

“It’s the Williams team and there is a cul­ture you have to take into account. We wouldn’t be com­fort­able putting in intru­sive tech­nol­o­gy that either stops peo­ple from doing their job or makes peo­ple feel like there’s some­one con­stant­ly sit­ting mon­i­tor­ing what they do,” he says.

Williams is push­ing for­ward with pio­neer­ing tech­nolo­gies, as many races often see win­ners and losers sep­a­rat­ed by split-sec­onds, and even a small com­pet­i­tive advan­tage can mean the dif­fer­ence between suc­cess and fail­ure. From inter­net of things-enabled bat­ter­ies that can trans­mit data about their lev­el of charge and cur­rent state, to bio­met­ric data col­lect­ed from the pit crew, all man­ner of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence solu­tions are being applied at the 40-year-old team.

The Williams CIO is keen to ensure a bal­ance is struck between secu­ri­ty and allow­ing cre­ativ­i­ty in the team

Although these ini­tia­tives may bring ben­e­fits to Williams, they also cre­ate new avenues for insid­er threats. “We’ve going to have to pro­tect all this new data and make sure it can’t be tam­pered with, espe­cial­ly as we’re look­ing at how machine-learn­ing and automa­tion can be used in race engi­neer­ing. For exam­ple, could we auto­mate some of the deci­sion-mak­ing that hap­pens at the track or call a pit stop with­out human inter­ven­tion. This can only be done if we’re con­fi­dent that the data is accu­rate and hasn’t been tam­pered with at all,” says Mr Hack­land.

The F1 car has been a con­nect­ed device since 1979 and the risks around insid­er threats are only set to grow as more advanced tech­nolo­gies are brought on to the race­course, but the Williams CIO is keen to ensure a bal­ance is struck between secu­ri­ty and allow­ing cre­ativ­i­ty in the team.

“The idea of con­trol­ling every­thing a com­pa­ny does using IT is just not pos­si­ble for CIOs any­more. I don’t want to be the bot­tle­neck that’s hold­ing up inno­va­tion in any part of my organ­i­sa­tion. I’m here to help with the projects IT is best suit­ed to, in every­thing from change man­age­ment to risk analy­sis and reli­a­bil­i­ty,” he con­cludes.