AI in Cyber Security

AI Used in Cyber Security

In this AI era, security teams are facing are huge burden to keep their organizations safe. With hackers using AI technology to sophisticate their attacks, as well as come up with new ones, many organizations are falling prey to such threats. According to Security Magazine, 75% of security professionals witnessed an increase in attacks over the past 12 months, with 85% attributing this rise to threat actors using generative AI. 

Well if hackers are going to use this AI technology to carry out cyber attacks, why not use the same AI to counter them? After all, AI technology can slash the time taken to detect, and respond to cyber threats by a staggering 14 weeks. As cyber attacks become more complex and frequent, human security experts are becoming increasingly inefficient at detecting such threats before they take precedence. Therefore, there's a dire need to leverage technology to keep systems secure.

Well let's explore some intelligent ways, AI is being used in the cyber security space.

Threat Detection and Prevention

One thing Artifcial Intelligence really excels in is analyzing large amounts of data to identify patterns. With the escalating complexity of cyber threats, and the significant volumes of data requiring analysis for potential risks, cyber experts are redefining their approaches. AI is now being used to analyze large amounts of data from different sources, to detect anomalies in patterns, anomalies that may indicate potential cyber attacks. The AI gets such capabilities from the training it undergoes on known threat signatures. 

Let's give an example. Say you work at an organization and an employee of yours clicks on a phishing email. The AI is able to detect a change in the employee's behaviour pattern. It becomes alert, and therefore checks through the vast knowledge it has on phishing emails. Once it detects that the email resembles a phishing email, it alerts the security team of the incident, enabling timely response to the threat before it escalates.

Security Log Analysis

As your tech stack increases, every new device (network devices, servers, applications) creates a large amount of distributed log data. Log data can be incredibly valuable for fast-moving organizations, because it contains the behavior patterns of your applications and infrastructure. But at this day and age, the rate at which events are being written to our log files, contributes to log overload.

It becomes nearly possible for security analysts to analyze such large amounts of data. Thanks to AI, this is made possible. It's able to leverage machine learning algorithms to analyze large amounts of real time log data. The best part is that as it analyzes the logs, it can pick up anomalies in patterns even without known threat signatures. Additionally, AI can detect potential insider threats by doing a comprehensive analysis of employee behaviour across multiple systems, and applications.

Threat Intelligence and Predictive Analytics

 AI does a great deal at improving threat and risk prediction. It does an inventory of all IT assets, inventory that encompasses all devices, users and applications, with varying access levels to critical systems. It then combines these data with it's knowledge of potential threats, enabling it to predict areas most susceptible to cyber breaches. The best part is the AI can adapt and self-learn from new data, improving the accuracy of threat detection over time. Such ability to analyze diverse data sources gives the organization's security team, a holistic view of an organization's overall security posture.

Automated Security Processes

One of the major use cases of AI in cyber seurity is performing monotonous and repetitive security tasks. Boring yet extremely important tasks, that cause security analysts to become complacent in their job. Moreover, AI is able to avert security risks by automatically responding to threats it has detected. It's able to automatically, isolate affected systems, block malicious traffic, as well as alert the security personell, of attempted attacks on the organization's systems.

Conclusion

The advent of AI into this world is like a double edged sword. On one side, it's given birth to new forms of cyber attacks. On the other, its provided new security solutions that will go a long way to boost overall cyber security measures. Leveraging AI technology enables security experts to have a proactive approach to curbing security threats, rather than reacting when its almost too late. AI has proven to be more efficient than human security analysts in a couple of ways. Thus, the AI becomes a very useful sidekick, freeing up time and energy for the team to handle more serious threats, that require human intervention. 

As with all previous technological advancements, some of us will find ways to use them to do harm. But, every cloud has a silver lining. I personally belief that in the cyber space, AI will do more good, than bad. Therefore let's embrace the efforts being put in place, to provide a safer digital world.