Leveraging AI for Cybersecurity
A report by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, concluded that the federal government is “unprepared” to defend themselves against the new threats posed by the increased malicious use of artificial intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence has been a trending topic for years and is getting widely adopted in several industries that are trying to leverage its powers. Similar to many other innovations, it can start to force a specific industry to utilize the technology to keep up with the competition and strive for excellence. When it comes to IT Security it seems to go both ways.
Not only is A.I emerging for CyberSecurity due to innovation within the industry, but also because cyber criminals are starting to leverage A.I for cyber attacks. For example utilizing AI powered Malware or AI to find vulnerabilities in networks or creating ever morphing viruses that we can’t keep up with.
How AI helps an IBM Summary
Learn
AI is trained by consuming billions of data artifacts from both structured and unstructured sources, such as blogs and news stories. Through machine learning and deep learning techniques, the AI improves its knowledge to “understand” cybersecurity threats and cyber risk.
Reason
AI gathers insights and uses reasoning to identify the relationships between threats, such as malicious files, suspicious IP addresses or insiders. This analysis takes seconds or minutes, allowing security analysts to respond to threats up to 60 times faster.
Augment
AI eliminates time-consuming research tasks and provides curated analysis of risks, reducing the amount of time security analysts take to make the critical decisions and launch an orchestrated response to remediate the threat.
A.I applications
We are not in the full “The Matrix” stage just yet. There are many A.I applications currently under development and various ways it can be utilized in the IT Security space. Here is a couple of examples of A.I implementation areas:
Network Vulnerability discovery and management: Vulnerabilities appear constantly and the traditional way of finding the vulnerability is unfortunately waiting for that vulnerability to be compromised. This forces companies to wait until after a vulnerability has been exploited to be able to take appropriate action.
AI can improve the vulnerability discovery through vulnerability databases, analyzing user behavior and detecting abnormal behavior to potentially stop a previously unknown attack, before the vulnerability is officially reported and patched.
Malware detection: Traditionally malware is detected through a signature based detection system that utilizes a database of known threats to identify threats. A.I can be capable of identifying more advanced threats without relying on known signatures and patterns.
Do you want to learn more about AI in IT Security and how it would fit in your current or future IT Security strategy? Contact us today!