How Could Artificial Intelligence Be Essential To Cybersecurity?

According to a survey conducted by Senseon as part of a research project on Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), 81 percent of participants believe that AI would improve the future of cybersecurity while only 3 percent disagree. The remaining 16 percent stated that they were uncertain. Due to how innovative AI has become over the past few years, it is reasonable that the survey generated such a result. The question is, how does the aspect of machine intelligence provide benefits to the company and what objectives and initiatives must the developer, analyst and decision maker establish to enable those types of AI to benefit the security of the cyber age?

The Microsoft Vice-President of Cybersecurity Solutions Group, Ann Johnson, told the RTE News during a meeting in Dublin that she sees about six and a half trillion cyber threats that Microsoft receive every day. She also mentioned that the company has incorporated machine learning technology to discover the actual threat and distinguish the “noise,” meaning the events that cause threats to be hard to detect. According to her statement, “The thing about machine learning and the thing about artificial intelligence is that you want different perspectives to train those engines anyway. So, there is a huge benefit.”

Network security has been attracting a lot of attention from the public lately due to a recent incident between the company Huawei and the US government. As a result, companies have been rearranging their organizational structure and searching for suitable technology to counter future threats.

There are several reasons as to why artificial intelligence could be the essential to the cybersecurity field. Firstly, AI software and programs are developed to perform better analytics and produce better results compared to those of a human. For example, the system could calculate complex mathematic based security encryption to ensure certain information is safe from being compromised by hackers. Secondly, AI provides increased efficiency for cybersecurity workflow, in this case allowing resources to be allocated to other important objectives. Rather than having people performing a repetitive and complicated calculation over a long period of time, they can act as a decision-maker, supporting the ethics of the organization in which the machine will perform. Thirdly, cyber attacks have also incorporated the power of robotics thinking into their development. If cyber organizations do not incorporate artificial intelligence, with the appropriate level of contingency prevention in case of the technology turning rogue, the company will be disadvantaged to prevent these threats.

 

According to the International Business Machines Corporation’s (IBM) website article; “as cyberattacks grow in volume and complexity, artificial intelligence (AI) is helping under-resourced security operations analysts stay ahead of threats.” It continued “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.” IBM is known to have recently deployed a supercomputer called IBM Watson which, according to the TechTarget definition, combines artificial intelligence and sophisticated analytical software for optimal performance as a “question answering” machine. David Ferrucci stated that the computer sources data from “encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, newswire articles, and literary works. Watson also used databases, taxonomies, and ontologies” to answer complicated questions.

In brief, artificial intelligence should be incorporated into the cybersecurity field due to the level of increased performance and possible advantages for the system to prevent the private and public data from being compromised. However, the initiative should be taken with the development of an appropriate amount of risk and crisis management procedures in case of the machine becoming uncontrollable.

 

Sophanith Song

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