“AI is changing the game for cyber security, analyzing massive quantities of risk data to speed response times and augment-under resource and security operations”
These days threats have become so quick which means that the attackers are evolving their tools the malware that they deploy the attacks that they use are constantly changing. The disadvantage of traditional security is unable to scale at the size of a modern organization. To overcome this, we are evolving with the next generation defenses leveraging AI, to not be programmed around a threat and have a pattern, but to be able to change and alternate and understand what is good or what’s bad and to be able to scale the size or the speed to keep up with the organization and also to the basic lockdown of security and almost do it in a way that it is done automatically on the behalf of the user.
Challenges of today’s cyber security:
The involved parties in cyberspace range from single individuals, private organizations, non-state actors to governmental organizations all aiming to protect their cyber assets. These cyber-threats arise from potential malicious acts due to financial, political, or military reasons.
Most cyber-attacks follow certain attack phases that can be described as a cyber kill chain.
AI – the savior or enemy?
Artificial intelligence poses both a boon and a curse to businesses, customers, and cybercriminals alike. AI technology is what provides us with speech recognition technology, Google’s search engine, Facebook’s facial recognition software. Today, even some credit card companies are using AI to help financial institutions to prevent billions in fraud.
But what about it in cyber security?
On one side, AI in cyber security is beneficial because it improves how security experts analyze, study, and understand cybercrime. It enhances the technologies that the companies use to defend themselves from cybercriminals to keep the organizations and the customers safe. On the other side, AI may not be practical in all applications. Most importantly, it can also be a new weapon in the arsenal of cybercriminals who use this technology to improve their cyber attacks.
How AI helps?
As cyber-attacks grow in volume and complexity, artificial intelligence (AI) is helping under-resourced security operations analysts stay ahead of threats. Curating threat intelligence from millions of research papers, blogs, and news stories, AI provides instant insights to help you fight through the noise of thousands of daily alerts, drastically reducing response times. AI technologies like machine learning and natural language processing enable analysts to respond to threats with greater confidence and speed.
Cognitive security: Smarter, Better
Cognitive security combines the strengths of artificial intelligence and human intelligence. Cognitive AI learns with each interaction to proactively detect and analyze threats, providing actionable insights to security analysts for making informed decisions with speed and accuracy.
How do hackers use your AI against you?
A risk for cyber security comes from AI in the form of adversarial AI, a term used to refer to the development and use of AI for malicious purposes. Essentially, this occurs when an AI system’s neural networks are tricked into misidentifying or misclassifying objects due to intentionally modified inputs.
For example, imagine that a cybercriminal creates an adversarial image that can bypass the facial recognition software in an iPhone X’s Face ID access feature that uses neural networks to recognize faces, making it susceptible to adversarial AI attacks. This would allow hackers to simply hack the security feature and continue their assault without drawing attention towards them.
Bottom line:
Cybersecurity service providers like E Com Security Solutions, a big 4 cybersecurity firm conduct a vulnerability assessment and Penetration testing by combining machine learning from over a billion cyber events across the world with human intelligence to detect cyber threats 60 times faster and effectively. This will help organizations solve unique cybersecurity challenges, gain actionable intelligence and understand threat actor tactics, techniques, and procedures used by cybercriminals against their environment.