The room for cyber attacks is huge and continues to grow rapidly. For this reason, cyber security has become an integral part of any business plan. With the rise of cybercrime, there is no denying that organizations need more than human intervention to mitigate risks.
Because of these challenges, artificial intelligence and cyber security are becoming the main focus of business technology. Cyber security AI can help teams eliminate data breaches and strengthen their security measures.
AI is designed to mimic human intelligence and automate tasks that require 24/7 surveillance and human intervention. If used well, it can analyze many events to detect different types of cyber threats – from phishing attacks to malware, ransomware and zero-day vulnerabilities. These technologies are constantly being learned using data from past cyber attacks to identify potential threats.
This article discusses the benefits of artificial intelligence in cyber security.
Network traffic monitoring
The organization’s network runs many activities and there is a huge amount of data exchange between companies and their clients. This sensitive data needs adequate protection against hackers and other malicious approaches.
However, IT security staff cannot independently analyze all this traffic. Cyber security AI can help you identify threats disguised in normal traffic. Unlike humans, AI can process and analyze large amounts of data more thoroughly and in less time.
Threat detection
With the pace at which cyber threats are evolving, the fact is that traditional rules-based security systems cannot keep up. Here come the AI systems. AI technologies are equipped with advanced algorithms to detect malware activity, trigger pattern recognition, and identify anomaly behavior before compromising the system.
AI has superior predictive intelligence with natural language, image, and other digital data processing capabilities that allow it to be the source of data itself through web scraping. This intelligence can provide security teams with knowledge of the latest attacks to create a better cybersecurity plan.
Vulnerability management
Proper vulnerability management is the best way to ensure an organization’s network. As mentioned earlier, a lot of traffic passes through an organization’s network and it becomes imperative to detect, identify, and prevent this traffic from being maliciously accessed.
Unlike human security staff, AI can quickly learn network behavior to identify a weak point in a system so that organizations can focus on ways to mitigate those risks. This can help improve vulnerability management, and the organization can provide network systems on time.
Risk forecasting
AI systems can help determine the inventory of your IT assets, documented records of all tangible and intangible assets. Cyber criminals are always trying to target this property. With the help of AI in cyber security, you can predict how and when cyber attacks will occur and plan to allocate resources to the most vulnerable areas accordingly.
Better endpoint protection
The number of devices we use in our workplace is growing rapidly and it is becoming impossible for cyber security staff to monitor. Artificial intelligence plays a vital role in securing devices. VPNs and antivirus solutions can protect your system from malware and ransomware based on known signatures. However, to protect your systems from new threats, you need to be updated with signature definitions.
This can pose a significant threat if your virus definition lags behind due to an update failure. In such cases, signature-based protection may not be able to protect you from new threats from malware. But using AI for cybersecurity will help you create a baseline that defines anomaly behavior for end devices.
AI indicates all activities that deviate from this baseline and takes appropriate action. May report unusual activities to appropriate security personnel. So instead of waiting for signature updates as with antivirus solutions, AI uses a proactive approach to preventing threats.
Duplicative process reduction
Cybercriminals are constantly looking for new ways to attack organizations and threaten their online resources. More often than not, we use the same basic security practices on a daily basis. Human rights staff may get bored or tired and miss a critical network update, exposing your network to threats.
AI was developed to mimic the best human qualities while eliminating flaws. This allows the AI to take care of duplicate processes that could exhaust your security staff. Performs regular security checks to identify and prevent cyber threats.
Incident Response
When an attack occurs, organizations must respond quickly to reduce risks and damage. A manual incident response strategy slows down the detection of threats and the required response, leaving user data at risk. However, AI automated response can track millions of security activities daily, understand threat patterns, and respond more quickly to critical events than cybersecurity staff.
With AI automated incident response, you can prioritize incident response events and ensure you have the necessary resources focused on high.
Is AI always effective in cyber security?
The use of AI in cyber security is mostly effective. It can help quickly analyze enormous amounts of data to detect and prevent unauthorized access before cybercriminals can do any harm. In addition, AI systems are always on the lookout, using prediction techniques to identify threats and prevent them from compromising your network.
However, there is a debate in the field about how effective AI is in cyber security. The problem is that sometimes small but accurate data proves to be more effective in practice (data-driven artificial intelligence). You don’t always need huge amounts of information to create accurate models. In fact, more often than not, large data sets can lead to AI systems giving false positive and inaccurate results.
According to US data scientist Andrew Ng, in some industries that do not have the luxury of large data sets, it is better to focus on “good data” instead of “big data”.
How do bad actors use AI?
AI is a double-edged sword that allows malicious threats but also prevents cyber crimes. Malicious hackers can use AI tools to improve the accuracy and efficiency of their attacks. They can use AI to bypass detection by learning the most common detection rules. Fuzzing is one of the standard techniques used by cybercriminals to uncover and exploit software vulnerabilities.
The use of artificial intelligence can improve the accuracy and precision of attacks, resulting in even more devastating damage. Also, cybercriminals can use artificial intelligence to improve phishing attacks. When AI launches a phishing attack, cyber criminals can extract only the information they need, making malware challenging to detect with traditional security solutions.
Final Thoughts
AI is evolving rapidly and is becoming an indispensable technology for all companies looking to improve their cybersecurity plan. The landscape of cyber attacks is growing, and people cannot successfully prevent attacks at the enterprise level. In addition, cybercriminals also adopt AI in their practices.
The use of AI in cybersecurity offers more insights and better identification of threats that security personnel can use to reduce data breaches and strengthen their security plans. Now is the time to take a decisive step towards using AI for cybersecurity to improve your IT infrastructure.
An announcement of the 7 benefits of using AI for cyber security first appeared on EasyDMARC.
*** This is a syndicated blog of the Security Bloggers network from EasyDMARC, by Knarik Petrosyan. Read the original post at: https://easydmarc.com/blog/7-benefits-of-using-ai-for-cybersecurity/
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