Artificial intelligence (AI) has recently been a game-changer for cyber security. With the growing volume and complexity of cyberattacks, AI allows companies to stay ahead of threats. If you’re wondering exactly how cybersecurity benefits from artificial intelligence, you’ve come to the right place. Keep reading to learn everything you need about using AI in cybersecurity.
Why Do We Need AI in Cybersecurity?
With an increasing number of companies and individuals forgoing the face-to-face business approach, cyberspace is growing at an unprecedented rate. Unfortunately, this also means that the cyberattack surface is equally as massive.
The vast attack surface is just one of the challenges modern enterprises face that can’t be solved using a simple human intervention. Other challenges include the following:
- A huge number of devices per organization
- A lack of skilled security professionals
- Massive amounts of data
- Many attack vectors
Artificial intelligence has become essential to information security as the only viable solution for these challenges. Unlike human employees, AI technology can quickly analyze millions of data sets and detect and respond to many cyber threats.
How Is AI Used in Cybersecurity?
Generally speaking, artificial intelligence is a fragmented field employing many different approaches to target specific problems. AI solutions for cybersecurity are no different. There are several ways in which AI is used in cybersecurity to ensure a risk-free and secure environment.
Detecting Threats
Traditional software systems have long stopped being able to keep up with the sheer amount of new malware created regularly.
In contrast, AI systems are programmed to detect malware, regardless of the number of malicious activities and whether they’ve encountered them before. The systems will run pattern recognition, allowing them to identify the slightest attack before it impacts the network.
The more data is fed to the AI system, the more cyberattacks, anomalies, and prevention strategies are learned. As a result, they can prioritize their responses based on what is most likely to attack the organization. This way, the AI systems don’t waste any time on security alerts that turn out to be false positives.
Adequately Responding to Incidents
While detecting an incoming threat is the first step in protecting the organization’s system, appropriately responding to security alerts is crucial.
AI technologies curate threat intelligence from millions of blogs, research papers, and news stories. These comprehensive sources allow them to cut through the noise of unimportant daily alerts and adequately respond to more severe threats.
More importantly, AI-powered systems can respond to incidents quicker than humans ever could. As time is of the essence when sensitive information and data are threatened, reducing response time is one of AI solutions’ most prominent benefits. A quick response will undoubtedly save your network from irreversible damage.
Battling Bots
Although bots are omnipresent on the internet and often disregarded as harmless, this isn’t always the case. In fact, bots can be a serious menace when created with malicious intent. Most commonly, “bad” bots can take over accounts by stealing the owner’s credentials, creating bogus accounts, and committing data fraud.
AI systems can be trained to build a thorough understanding of the website traffic, thus allowing them to distinguish between the bots and the human users. The next step is to separate the “bad” bots from the “good” bots, such as search engine crawlers.
By observing the behavioral patterns of users, AI helps cybersecurity teams modify their strategy accordingly and stay ahead of malicious bots.
Assessing Breach Risks
Thanks to AI-powered systems, an organization can compile an accurate IT asset inventory detailing the following:
- All the devices used within the organization
- All users and their level of clearance
- All applications used and their access to various systems
Artificial intelligence will use these records to predict how and where the organization will most likely be compromised. As a result, the organization can adequately allocate resources to the most vulnerable areas.
Efficiently Protecting Endpoints
The more employees work from home, the more threats to endpoint security.
Basic solutions such as VPNs and anti-virus software can protect the system against certain attacks. However, they typically work based on signatures, meaning you must always keep up with the latest signature definitions. If there’s any lag in updating these software solutions, a malware attack can go unnoticed.
AI-driven endpoint protection tackles the issue in a different, more reliable manner. It establishes a baseline of behavior after being trained repeatedly. If anything unusual happens, the AI system will flag it and take appropriate action. This proactive approach dramatically improves endpoint security.
Securing Authentication
Nowadays, most websites offer a user account feature where individuals can log in and access their services or products. Visitors typically fill in contact forms that can contain sensitive information. Therefore, it’s crucial to ensure that such information remains secure. In addition, the whole network can be at risk if an attacker gains access to a user’s account.
Artificial intelligence is used to secure authentication every time a user logs into their account. It employs various tools, with the most universally used ones being the following:
- Facial recognition
- CAPTCHA
- Fingerprint scanner
After collecting data using these tools, the AI system can decide if the log-in attempt is genuine or not.
The Benefits of Using AI in Cybersecurity
Artificial intelligence presents many advantages in cybersecurity. It helps organizations fend off cyberattacks more effectively than manual techniques or conventional software-driven solutions.
AI Continuously Learns
AI consumes massive data artifacts that allow it to improve its knowledge constantly. Furthermore, these technologies draw data from past experiences to pinpoint vulnerabilities in the system.
Once an AI-powered solution is properly trained, it continues to gather data independently from across the organization’s information systems using machine learning and deep learning. After that, the collected data is analyzed and used to identify relevant patterns in the business network’s behavior. As a result, it can promptly react to deviations from the learned norm.
AI Finds and Responds to Threats Faster
AI can assess the organization’s system much quicker than any cybersecurity personnel. These intelligent solutions can take only seconds to analyze the relationship between threats, such as suspicious IP addresses or malicious files. This helps significantly increase the organization’s problem-solving abilities.
It’s worth noting that not detecting a threat isn’t always the issue. Sometimes the sheer number of simultaneous attacks makes it impossible to respond promptly without using AI.
As with many other benefits, this impressive speed is also made possible by the massive amounts of risk data the AI-powered system analyzes.
AI Can Handle a Lot of Data
Although giant corporations usually face most risks, even mid-sized companies deal with a substantial amount of traffic. This means the cybersecurity personnel can’t keep up with the daily data transfer. Luckily, AI solutions can skim through massive chunks of data to identify potential threats hiding in the sea of traffic.
AI Improves Cyber Security Reporting
AI can also help understand the impact of an organization’s security processes by identifying its strengths and weaknesses. This can allow organizations to report relevant information to all the involved parties, including:
- Stakeholders
- End users
- Security operators
- Auditors
- CISO, CIO, and CEO
- Board of directors
The Downsides to Using AI in Cybersecurity
Artificial intelligence has a huge potential to continue improving cybersecurity. However, no system is inherently perfect, so there are also some downsides to using artificial intelligence in this field.
AI Can Be Inadequately Trained
As mentioned in the article, most benefits of using AI in cybersecurity heavily rely on feeding massive data sets to the system. These data sets aren’t always easy to come by and sometimes require more investment than an organization can afford.
Without an adequate volume of data, AI solutions can render incorrect results and false positives. Furthermore, the systems can use inaccurate or manipulated data. Failing to notice data manipulation can lead to potentially disastrous consequences as the organization fights to retrieve the correct data.
Adversaries Can Use AI
Cybersecurity professionals can use AI to minimize the cyberattack surface and reinforce good practices against malicious activity. Sadly, cybercriminals can also get their hands on AI systems and use them to attack a network.
Adversarial AI causes artificial intelligence models to misinterpret system inputs and open the door to the attacker. Simply put, the attackers can target the data used for training the defensive AI systems and disable or change the warning flags.
Alternatively, hackers can use AI to develop mutating malware that can avoid detection, thus foiling security algorithms.
Driving Cybersecurity Forward
Even with its downsides, employing artificial intelligence to strengthen cybersecurity will be imperative for most modern enterprises. After all, humans can no longer adequately protect the vast cyberattack surface.
A properly trained AI will help identify and prioritize risks, direct incident response, reduce breach risk, and compile and provide the much-needed data to the cybersecurity personnel. As a result, it will enhance the performance of the security teams and pave the way for a cyber-safe organization.
