Artificial intelligence : The cybersecurity arms race and how AI is influencing it

Artificial intelligence

The cybersecurity arms race and how AI is influencing it

The average firm utilizes a variety of software tools to monitor for intruders, malware, and other dangers, and these systems generate 10,000 warnings every day. The data that cybersecurity employees must filter through to manage their cyber defenses frequently overwhelms them.

The odds are against us. Millions of people and thousands of organizations in the United States alone are being impacted by an increase in cyberattacks.

These difficulties highlight the need for more effective strategies to halt the rise of cyber-breaches. Finding patterns in vast amounts of data is a task that artificial intelligence is especially well equipped for. As a researcher who focuses on cybersecurity and AI, I observe that AI is quickly becoming a crucial tool in cybersecurity.

Helping people

There are primarily two ways that AI is enhancing cybersecurity. First off, AI may assist in automating a variety of duties that a human analyst would typically undertake manually. Unknown workstations, servers, code repositories, and other pieces of hardware and software on a network can all be automatically detected as part of this. It can also decide how to effectively distribute security measures. These are tasks that require a lot of data, and AI has the potential to process terabytes of data in a way that is far more productive and efficient than a person ever could.

Second, AI has the ability to find patterns in massive amounts of data that human analysts are unable to. AI, for instance, may identify the crucial linguistic patterns used by hackers to upload new risks on the dark web and notify experts.

More particular, AI-enabled analytics can assist in deciphering the slang and code words that hackers use to describe their new instruments, methods, and approaches. One illustration is calling a botnet by its name, Mirai. The name was created by hackers to obscure the botnet subject from specialists in law enforcement and cyberthreat intelligence.

In cybersecurity, AI has already seen some early triumphs. Companies like FireEye, Microsoft, and Google are increasingly creating cutting-edge AI methods to find malware, stop phishing scams, and keep track of the spread of misinformation. Microsoft's Cyber Signals initiative, which employs artificial intelligence to monitor 24 trillion security signals, 40 nation-state groups, and 140 hacker groups to create cyberthreat intelligence for C-level executives, is one notable result.

The Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation, two federal funding organizations, have invested tens of millions of dollars to develop sophisticated AI tools for extracting insights from data generated by the dark web and open-source software platforms like GitHub, a global software development code repository where hackers can share code as well. These organizations also recognize the potential of AI for cybersecurity.

Issues with AI

Security experts are unsure of AI's place despite the technology's enormous benefits for cybersecurity. Companies may be considering using AI systems to replace their human analysts, but they may be unsure of how much they can rely on these machines. Additionally, it is unclear whether and how cybersecurity systems built on AI will be affected by the well-known AI issues of bias, fairness, transparency, and ethics.

Additionally, malevolent hackers can benefit from AI as well as cybersecurity experts working to stem the flood of intrusions. Attackers are developing new kinds of cyberattacks that can elude cyber defenses by employing techniques like reinforcement learning and generative adversarial networks, which build new information or software based on a small sample size.

Researchers and experts in cybersecurity are continuously discovering all the different ways that hostile hackers are utilizing AI.

The future route

There is a lot of potential for AI in cybersecurity going forward. Analysts will be able to respond to new risks thanks in part to the predictions made by AI systems based on the patterns they find. AI is a fascinating tool that, with careful development, might become a necessary tool for the upcoming generation of cybersecurity professionals and help slow the flood of intrusions.

But given how quickly AI is developing, completely automated cyberwars between AI attackers and AI defenders are probably still years away.