Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Cyber Security

Cyberattacks atrewidely acknowledged as the one of the top threats in the digital world, leading to an increasing number of organisations from around the world to leverage artificial intelligence in cyber security operations.

Such applications of artificial intelligence in cyber security might still seem to be new, but they are already showing a great potential in terms of enabling organisations and companies to detect, prevent or react to emerging cyber threats more promptly and more effectively than ever before.

Since data has become the biggest valuable for any modern business, cyber attackers are trying everything to hack this information.  Traditional computer defence software is no longer enough to protect companies’ data from fast-increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks.

In response to this worldwide struggle of data security, the emerging features such as ‘artificial intelligence’ or ‘machine learning’ fast becoming some of the best solutions to tackle this global issue.Although many AI based innovations still require maturity and still have their drawbacks, no one can deny that the great power of artificial intelligence in cyber security is making this world of digitalisation better and safer.

Why is Cyber Security So Important?

As the whole world is becoming more digitalised, cybercrime is now one of the biggest threats to all businesses and government organisations around the world.Various types of cyber-attacks, such as unauthorised access, ransomware or malware, misconfiguration, Phishing, API, credential stuffing, and malicious insider, are causing a huge loss to the global economy.

According to recent reports from Juniper and ForgeRock, cyber criminals exposed 2.8 billion consumer data records in 2018, costing US organisations over USD 654 billion. Meanwhile, the cost of cybercrime is expected to exceed USD 2 trillion globally in 2019. It is estimated that cyber-attacks to US financial services organisations cost the industry over USD 6.2 billion in Q1 2019 alone, a figure which increased by USD 8 million from Q1 2018.

Even though there was approximately USD 114 billion invested in cyber security products and services in 2018, cybercriminals continue to successfully attack organisations across different industries to gain access to valuable consumer data.

The latest US consumer data breach report from ForgeRock identifies that personally identifiable information (PII) was the most targeted data for breaches in 2018, comprising 97% of all breaches.The research also found the most frequent attack method was from unauthorised access, representing 34% of all cyber-attacks in 2018. Several industries such as healthcare, financial services, and government were among the most attached sectors by cyber attackers.

To minimize the impact of cyber-attacks, companies and organizations are looking to apply AI technologies to combat these threats more effectively.

Artificial intelligence in cyber security plays an important role in threat detection, pattern recognition, and response time reduction. It also helps in combating threats such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Adopting AI in cyber security offers better solutions when it comes to analysing massive quantities of data, speeding up response times, and increasing efficiency of under-resourced security operations.

Cyber-attacks can be predicted by tracking cyber threats through cyber security analytics which uses Big Data to create predictive analyses of how and when cyber-attacks will occur. The network activity can be analysed while also comparing data samples using predictive analytics algorithms.

Artificial intelligence can help to enhance the capabilities of cyber security through several aspects, including machine learning, risk identification, access securing and fast responses.

Machine Learning

AI is designed and trained to collect, store, analyse and process significant amount of data from both structured and unstructured sources. Thanks to emerging technologies such as machine learning and deep learning, the AI can constantly evolve and improve its knowledge about cybersecurity threats and cyber risk.

The latest trend has seen many cyber security companies are teaching AI systems how to detect malware and viruses by implementing several datasets of algorithms and codes.With these data sets, AI can establish and adjust pattern recognition that helps to detect and identify malicious behaviour on the Internet.

Risk Identification

Risk identification is an essential feature of adopting artificial intelligence in cyber security. AI’s data processing capability is able to reason and identify the threats through different channels, such as malicious software, suspicious IP addresses, or virus files.
 
Moreover, machine learning can also analyse various of websites or micro-behaviour of software to detect whether they will navigate to malicious files or attacks. In other words, AI systems can predict and recognise a risk before the actual cyber-attack strikes.

Access Securing

Companies and organisations normally use authentication model to secure access of data from outsiders. However, conventional login details, such as username and password are vulnerable to cyber attackers.

Therefore, AI systems use multi-factor authentication for better protection of access. Factors such as user behaviour, device, personal information, device, location, and even biometrics are all analysed by AI cyber security systems to ensure the security of data access.

Fast Responses

AI analysis towards cyber-attacks only takes seconds or minutes, which is much easier and faster than using conventional cybersecurity systems.
 
With the implementation of artificial intelligence in cyber security, human employees do not need to conduct time-consuming research tasks for cyber risks anymore, and it effectively reduces the response time for companies and organisations on preparing effective strategies to fight against numerous cyber-attacks.

TechNavio:         Juniper Reserach:      ForgeRock: 

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