Artificial Intelligence is becoming increasingly important in the area of information security.
They have the ability to analyze millions of data sets in the shortest time, it will detect, and alerts the cybersecurity experts of potential cyber risks, from malware to deceptive conduct that might lead to phishing attacks.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are constantly improving and learning complex issues, drawing on data from previous and current cyber attacks to identify new types of assaults that might occur in the future course of time.
The organization’s cybersecurity is jeopardized by current tech. Security professionals fail at some times, even with new improvements in protection techniques.
From vulnerability checks to defense, combining the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence in cybersecurity with the expertise of security experts becomes exceptionally successful.
Organizations benefit from immediate insights and, as a result, have a faster reaction time. The latest trend in security is artificial intelligence for cyber security.
Artificial intelligence makes an attempt to demonstrate the human intellect. It has enormous applications in the field of cybersecurity.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems can be trained to create danger warnings, discover new forms of malware, and secure critical data for businesses if used appropriately.
AI is the best cybersecurity solution for today’s organizations that want to succeed online.
Security professionals require significant help from intelligent machines and modern technology such as AI to operate effectively and protect their organizations from cyber threats. This essay examines the advantages of combining AI with cybersecurity.
Table of Contents
Benefits of Incorporating Artificial Intelligence in Cybersecurity
Artificial Intelligence has many benefits and applications in various fields, including cybersecurity.
With fast-evolving cyberattacks in today’s online world and the rapid use of modern electronic devices, Artificial Intelligence can assist in keeping an eye on cybercriminals who try to compromise network systems, automating cyber threat detection and responding more efficiently and accurately than traditional software which are driven by manual processes.
Some of the benefits and uses of Artificial Intelligence in the cybersecurity field are given below
1) New Threats Detection
Artificial intelligence is increasingly used to detect cyber risks and potentially dangerous attacks on network systems.
Conventional software systems cannot detect the considerable volume of new viruses that are released every day by hackers. Therefore this is an area where artificial intelligence can really assist cyber security teams.
Artificial Intelligence machines are being trained to identify and detect the pattern recognition of malware or ransomware viruses before they reach the networks of an organization using complex algorithms and creating a new firewall for it.
Natural language processing of Artificial Intelligence will provide us the greater predictive intelligence by curating all the related articles, and news quickly to research the cyber risks.
This can provide information on newly released viruses, and cyberattacks and provide adequate countermeasures to be implemented. After all, hackers follow the same trends as the rest of us, so what’s hot with them changes all the time.
Artificial Intelligence-based cybersecurity solutions will provide the most up-to-date knowledge of threats faced by global and industries and allow cyber experts to make more informed decisions based on the inputs provided by the AI machines to protect the network systems.
2) Bots in Combat
No less than 20% of today’s internet traffic to websites/blogs gets artificially created traffic called bot traffic and they are potentially harmful.
Bots may be a severe threat, from taking over admin accounts using brute force attacks by submitting passwords until they succeed.
Manual actions against such automated threats are not sufficient to protect administrator accounts.
Artificial Intelligence can identify good bots such as search engine crawlers and provides complete data on website traffic from different locations.
Artificial Intelligence saves us huge time by evaluating large amounts of data in the quickest possible time and allows cybersecurity professionals to come up with suitable solutions to a changing threat environment.
“By analyzing behavioral patterns, companies may learn how to answer questions like ‘what does an average user trip look like?’ and ‘what does a dangerous atypical journey look like?’
From here, we can decipher the purpose of their website traffic and keep ahead of the bad bots,” says Mark Greenwood, Netacea’s Chief Technical Architect and Head of Data Science.
3) Ensuring Breach Risk-Free Security
Artificial Intelligence machines assist the management of an organization in determining the asset inventory, like the number of devices/systems, human resources of various departments and applications with varying levels of access to different network systems.
Artificial Intelligence systems can predict, and anticipate the magnitude of the cyber-attack and how and where you are most likely to be hacked, allowing you to execute the plan of action to counter it in vulnerability situations.
By implementing the data received from AI-based analysis, you can design and optimize standard operating procedures (SOPs) to boost the cyber resilience of your organization.
4) Improved Endpoint Security
The number of electronic devices used for virtual work is growing rapidly and Artificial Intelligence will play a vital role in preventing any cyber attacks on all of those endpoints.
Traditional antivirus software services will protect the network systems and Software as a Service (SaaS) against the injection of malware and ransomware attacks by relying on existing signatures.
This implies that they have to keep an update on new signatures of viruses to proactively eliminate them and protect the cloud data against the new threats.
If virus signatures do not keep an eye on new threats either due to a failure to update the antivirus program by the software manufacturer, then millions of systems that are installed with that anti-virus software will get compromised.
As a result, if a new form of malware assault emerges, signature protection may be ineffective.
“AI-driven endpoint security takes a different approach, relying on a recurrent training process to create a baseline of behavior for the endpoint.
If anything unusual happens, AI can detect it and take appropriate action, such as notifying a technician or returning to a safe state after a ransomware assault.
“Rather of waiting for signature updates, this enables proactive protection against threats,” says Tim Brown, VP of Security Infrastructure at SolarWinds.
5) AI learns itself with time
Artificial Intelligence technology is intelligent, as the name implies, and it leverages that intelligence to improve network security over time. It learns the behavior of a business network over time using machine learning and deep learning.
It detects patterns in the network and groups them together. It then goes on to look for any deviations or security events from the norm before taking action.
Artificial neural networks can assist enhance security in the future by learning patterns over time.
Potential threats with comparable characteristics to those documented are identified early enough and prevented. The fact that Artificial Intelligence is always learning makes it tough for hackers to outsmart it.
Drawbacks of Artificial Intelligence in Cybersecurity
The above-mentioned applications and benefits of Artificial Intelligence are some of the measures for enhancing cybersecurity.
However, there are some drawbacks to implementing AI in the information security field.
Only big Organizations can only employ this because it requires huge financial as well as qualified human resources to create and manage an Artificial Intelligence system.
More importantly, Artificial Intelligence systems work using the non-malicious code, malware and anomaly sets that need to be collected prior to the start of implementing AI technology which is expensive and time-consuming and cannot be affordable for small business management.
Working on AI systems sometimes becomes risky because it may provide you with some false-positive results in the absence of required data sets.
Blindly taking the output data from Artificial Intelligence might sometimes backfire while implementing that in a real-world scenario.
Like you, hackers may also use Artificial Intelligence to compromise the software/network security systems by carrying out more sophisticated assaults.
Courses in Cybersecurity Artificial Intelligence
Among all, the best courses offered by the ISC2 organization, it’s a perfect guide to the ifs and buts of AI-related cybersecurity.
About The Course
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming more ubiquitous in security professionals’ personal and professional lives, with several well-known and apparent applications and those that are hidden and less visible.
This course covers the fundamentals of data science in AI, including frameworks and languages, as well as the issues that security professionals confront when collaborating with AI developers.
Some Practical Instances of AI implementation in Cybersecurity Domain
AI can be considered to have certain aspects of human intelligence, such as a store of domain-specific knowledge, methods for learning new information, and systems for putting that information to use.
Today’s Artificial Intelligence technology includes machine learning, expert systems, neural networks, and deep learning, to name a few instances or subsets.
ML employs statistical approaches to allow computers to “learn” (e.g., increase performance over time) from data rather than being explicitly programmed.
Machine learning works best when it is focused on a single job rather than a broad purpose.
Expert systems are computer programs that handle issues in certain fields. They solve issues and make judgments utilizing fuzzy rule-based reasoning and carefully curated repositories of information, replicating the thinking of human experts.
Neural networks are a programming paradigm inspired by biology that allows a computer to learn from observational data.
Each node in a neural network provides weight to its input, indicating how accurate or wrong it is in relation to the action at hand. The total of these weights is then used to calculate the final output.
Deep learning is a type of machine learning that is focused on learning data representations rather than task-specific algorithms.
Deep learning-based image identification is now typically superior to humans in a number of applications, including autonomous cars, scan analysis, and medical diagnostics.
Leading Organization that applies AI to Cyber Security
Google: Since its inception 18 years ago, Gmail has employed machine learning algorithms to filter emails.
Machine learning is now used in virtually all of the company’s services, particularly deep learning, which allows algorithms to make more autonomous changes and self-regulation as they train and grow.
Juniper Networks: The networking ecosystem is hungry for revolutionary ideas to solve the current network’s untenable economics. Juniper views a production-ready, cost-effective Self-Driving NetworkTM as the solution to this challenge.
IBM/Watson: IBM’s Watson cognitive learning framework has been increasingly used for “knowledge containment” activities and machine learning-based threat detection.
What is AI in Data Security?
Instead of continually chasing after harmful behavior, IT security professionals may utilize Artificial Intelligence and machine learning (ML) to enforce good cybersecurity practices and decrease the attack surface.
State-sponsored attackers, criminal cyber-gangs, and ideological hackers, on the other hand, can use the same AI methods to bypass defenses and escape discovery. The “AI/cybersecurity moral dilemma” exists here.
Instead of constantly monitoring for suspicious behavior, cybersecurity professionals may utilize AI to promote cybersecurity best practices and reduce the attack surface.
Cybercriminals, on the other hand, can use the same AI systems for nefarious reasons. According to Accenture, adversary AI “causes machine learning models to misunderstand inputs into the system and act in a way that is beneficial to the attacker.”
The iPhone’s “FaceID” access function, for example, relies on neural networks to detect faces, leaving it vulnerable to adversarial AI assaults. Hackers may create adversarial pictures to get over Face ID’s security measures and easily carry on with their work.
Companies will need to be aware of the possible drawbacks of AI as it grows and expands into the cybersecurity space:
- Hackers may defeat security algorithms by targeting the data they train on and the warning flags they search for, thus machine learning and artificial intelligence can assist protect against cyber-attacks.
- AI systems will provide erroneous findings and false positives if they are not fed huge amounts of data and events.
- Organizations may struggle to retrieve the proper data that feeds their AI systems if data tampering goes unnoticed, with potentially devastating implications.
AI Cybersecurity Tools
1) Symantec’s Targeted attack analytics tool
Symantec created this technology, which is used to detect stealthy and targeted assaults. It uses Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to improve Symantec’s security professionals’ and researchers’ procedures, expertise, and skills.
Symantec deployed the TAA tool to combat the Dragonfly 2.0 threat last year. Multiple energy firms were targeted in this attack, which attempted to obtain access to operational networks.
TAA identifies suspicious behavior on specific endpoints and analyses the data to see if each action indicates concealed harmful activity. Customers of Symantec Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) can now use the TAA tools.
2) Intercept X tool- by Sopho
The Intercept X can collect millions of characteristics from a file before it executes, do a thorough analysis, and identify whether a file is benign or dangerous in 20 milliseconds.
The approach is based on real-world feedback and bidirectional threat information exchange via data scientists’ access to millions of samples.
As a consequence, the accuracy rate for current and zero-day malware is high, and the false positive rate is minimal. Behavioral analysis is used by Intercept X to prevent new ransomware and boot-record assaults.
The Intercept X has been tested by a number of third parties, including NSS laboratories, and has received excellent results. It has also been verified by VirusTotal since August of this year.
3) QRadar Advisor by IBM
To combat cyber assaults, IBM’s QRadar Advisor makes use of IBM Watson technology. It employs artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically examine signs of a breach or exploit.
QRadar Advisor speeds the response cycle by using cognitive reasoning to provide important insights. Security analysts can analyze threat occurrences and decrease the chance of missing them with IBM’s QRadar Advisor.
AI implementation in Cybersecurity: Outlook
AI has emerged as a necessary tool for complementing the work of human information security teams in recent years.
Because humans can no longer guard the dynamic corporate attack surface effectively, AI delivers much-needed analysis and threat detection that can be used by cybersecurity professionals to decrease breach risk and enhance overall security.
In the field of security, AI can identify and prioritize risk, detect malware on a network instantaneously, lead incident response, and detect intrusions before they occur.
AI enables cybersecurity teams to build strong human-machine collaborations that expand our knowledge, enhance our lives, and drive cybersecurity in ways that appear to be larger than the sum of their parts.
The Future Aspects of AI in CyberSecurity
The future of Artificial Intelligence for big businesses is enormous, and it’s just growing rapidly.
To accurately evaluate the risk your company may face that depends on the size of your company and several millions of varying signals must be examined by the AI system to benefit any company or an organization,
What’s the end result?
Identifying, analyzing and preventing the magnitude of the cybersecurity risk to any big software and network security organizations are no longer solved by human brains.
As a result of these huge data security challenges, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based cybersecurity technologies have been developed to assist qualified information security teams in reducing breach data/information and improving their security infrastructure quickly and effectively.
This is just the beginning, the scope is huge…….. And we’ve barely scratched the surface!
