Can AI Transform Cybersecurity?
Being the next big thing in the technology sector, Artificial Intelligence or AI is already a very popular buzzword. With the likes of the Internet of Things, big data, single-page applications, cloud, 5G or virtual reality, AI has also become increasingly popular among the technology geeks as well as the general population. Above all, the majority of the earlier listed technologies finds the implementation of AI in their domain for achieving the expectations. Similar to this, now experts are also finding AI useful for cybersecurity which is one of the major threat to the current generation.
Every time a single user uses any device to connect with the internet, the risk of cyberattack grows. Today, from the big names like Google or Facebook to the kid using personal computer at his or her home is vulnerable to cyberattack, piracy, data theft and hacking.
The data breach has become the major concern for companies or organizations regardless of their size. Because of this, all the big names are continuously pouring money for cyber defenses to avert all the hacking, data theft and other possibilities.
Today, several experts are finding AI and machine learning a boon for data security. So, the question comes, how Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can change all? And how future looks with AI for cyberattacks?
Kids from every generation are told about the stories of the world having flying cars or served by robots, however, science hasn’t quite come that far. Yet, we have progressed by many folds in the last few decades. Maybe robots are not preparing our dinners or acting as a valet but most people have their own Siri or Cortana, one of the most developed and advanced voice assistants till now.
All of this happened because of Artificial Intelligence, it can really do a lot of things for humans. Apart from this and others, AI has also made significant strides in Cybersecurity. Numerous cybersecurity providers are now offering products that use AI and machine learning for detecting and responding to cyberattacks. Here AI is being used for network analysis, email analysis, in antivirus, biometric login, detecting threats and so much more.
A large part of cybersecurity is the boring and hectic task requiring trawling of large chunks of data, looking for anomalies or looking for the indicators of a potential attack. Once the threat is detected, further data analysis is required for identifying the details which takes a lot of time and honestly, humans are really bad for doing this task.
Contrary to this, computers don’t get bored and can easily do the data analysis at large scale for detecting the anomalies. Here, artificial intelligence comes in the picture which can provide scalability for ensuring the cybersecurity or the organization. It can help humans by filtering out unwanted data and bringing the most relevant data for analysis.
Still, artificial intelligence is in the developing phase and lots of applications are yet to be developed or explored. Yet, there are several AI-based advanced systems which are helping organizations to defend against cyber threats.
Because of the huge amount of data requiring analysis, network analysis is perfect for machine learning algorithms. Majority of the cyber attacker work over the network, so monitoring the network communication itself is a good way for threat detection.
ML-based algorithms can prevent the misuse of common protocols for C2 i.e. command-and-control communications with which hackers can blend easily with the rest of the traffic over the network. They place data in HTTP header values or embed it in DNS) requests which can easily bypass the firewall and increases the probability of being overlooked. Here these ML algorithms can use keyword matching, anomaly detection, stats monitoring and other possibilities to determine whether the given packet is different from others or not. And if different then it’s brought to human attention for future analysis.
