Artificial intelligence is emerging as a key cybersecurity tool for both attackers and defenders

In a connected world, where computers are fast becoming the most widely seen objects, they are also the most infected ones with advanced persistent attacks that are high in volume and multidimensional. The threat data generated by these attacks are voluminous, and analyzing the alerts produced by these threats can be tedious and time consuming, if done manually. Legacy security systems are obsolete to manage such tasks and cannot monitor, detect, and respond to threats in real-time.

A report says, an average business receives 10,000 alerts every day from various software tools it uses to monitor for intruders, malware, and other threats. Cyberattacks are increasing and affecting millions of organizations globally. A question ultimately comes, why our dependency increases day by day on technology, are we slavery to the technology? The growing challenges underscore the need for better ways to stem the tide of cyber-breaches. The digital world presents a range of vulnerability areas, and anomalies can show up just above anywhere.

When a breach happens, the attacks can enact various behaviors as they move across the network. Tracking the attackers’ footsteps are the key to knowing their intentions, how they breached your network, and the pathways taken to access various assets.

Artificial intelligence is particularly well suited to finding patterns in huge amounts of data. AI can help automate many tasks that a human analyst would often handle manually. These include automatically detecting unknown workstations, servers, code repositories, and other hardware and software on a network. It can also determine how best to allocate security defenses.

These are data-intensive tasks, and AI has the potential to sift through terabytes of data much more efficiently and effectively than a human could ever do. Secondly, AI can help detect patterns within large quantities of data that human analysts can’t see. For example, AI could detect the key linguistic patterns of hackers posting emerging threats on the dark web and alert analysts. Despite the significant benefits of AI for cybersecurity, cybersecurity professionals have questions and concerns about AI’s role.

Attackers are using methods like reinforcement learning and generative adversarial networks, which generate new content or software based on limited examples, to produce new types of cyberattacks that can evade cyber defenses. AI is useful not only for cybersecurity professionals trying to turn the tide against cyberattacks but also for malicious hackers.

Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, President & CEO, VARINDIA