Decoding the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Cyber Security
In today’s day and age where everything has become digital about our lives right from working, paying bills and handling important documents, to even simple things like playing games shopping for clothes or just talking with our friends and loved ones.
However, with our lives becoming more active online, keeping your personal data safe is more important than ever before. This is where cyber security comes in.
Cybersecurity is the practice of protecting systems, networks, and programs from digital attacks. These cyberattacks are usually aimed at accessing, changing, or destroying sensitive information; extorting money from users; or interrupting normal business processes.
The unprecedented events of 2020 disrupted businesses, damaged the global economy, and shook the cybersecurity industry. Companies across all sectors have experienced a spike in cyberattacks as COVID-19 reshaped the workplace. Throughout the year, hackers deployed various techniques to steal information and personal data from remote workers, hit hospitals with ransomware, and targeted the developers of COVID-19 vaccines. As organizations secured their remote workforces, most needed to rethink their existing policies, system controls, and risk management functions. The rapid shift to remote working increased most organizations’ attack surface, exposing them to more vulnerabilities. This period also accelerated many trends, such as digitalization and migration to the cloud.
Artificial intelligence endeavours to simulate human intelligence. It has immense potential in cybersecurity. If harnessed correctly, Artificial Intelligence or AI systems can be trained to generate alerts for threats, identify new types of malware and protect sensitive data for organisations.
According to TechRepublic, a midsized company gets alerts for over 200,000 cyber events every day. A team of security experts in an average company cannot deal with this volume of threats. Some of these threats will, therefore, naturally go unnoticed and cause severe damage to networks.
AI is the ideal cybersecurity solution for businesses looking to thrive online today. Security professionals need strong support from intelligent machines and advanced technologies like AI to work successfully and protect their organisations from cyber attacks.
Benefits:-
1. AI Learns More Over Time
As the name suggests, AI technology is intelligent, and it uses its ability to improve network security over time. It uses machine learning and deep learning to learn a business network’s behaviour over time. It recognizes patterns on the network and clusters them. It then proceeds to detect any deviations or security incidents from the norm before responding to them.
The patterns that artificial neural networks learn over time can help to improve security in the future. Potential threats with similar traits to those recorded get blocked early enough. The fact that AI keeps learning makes it difficult for hackers to beat its intelligence.
2. Artificial Intelligence Identifies Unknown Threats
A human being may not be able to recognise all of a company’s dangers. Every year, hackers carry out hundreds of millions of attacks for a variety of reasons. Unknown threats can do a lot of harm to a network. Even worse is the damage they can cause if you don’t discover, identify, and prevent them.
As attackers try new strategies, such as sophisticated social engineering and malware attacks, contemporary solutions are needed to protect against them. AI has shown to be one of the most effective technologies for identifying and preventing unexpected dangers from wreaking havoc on a corporation.
3. AI Can Handle a Lot of Data
On a company’s network, there is a lot of activity. A typical mid-sized business has a lot of traffic. That means a lot of data is exchanged among customers and the company on a daily basis. This information must be safeguarded against malicious people and software. However, cybersecurity personnel cannot inspect all traffic for potential threats.
AI is indeed the best solution for detecting threats disguised as normal activity. Because it is automated, it can sift through massive amounts of data and traffic. AI-powered technology, such as a residential proxy, can assist you in data transfer. It can also identify any threats lying inside the sea of chaotic traffic.
4. Better Vulnerability Management
Vulnerability management is critical to the security of a company’s network. As previously stated, the average company faces numerous threats on a daily basis. To be safe, it must detect, identify, and prevent them. AI research can aid in vulnerability management by analysing and assessing existing security measures.
AI enables you to assess systems faster than cybersecurity personnel, vastly improving your problem-solving abilities. It identifies vulnerabilities in computer systems and business networks and assists businesses in focusing on critical security tasks. As a result, vulnerability can be managed and business systems can be secured in real time.
5. Better Overall Security
The threats that business networks face change from time to time. Hackers change their tactics every day. That makes it difficult to prioritize security tasks at a company. You may have to deal with a phishing attack along with a denial-of-service attack or ransomware at a go.
These attacks have similar potential but you must know what to deal with first. Bigger threats that can make security a challenge are human error and negligence. The solution here is to deploy AI on your network to detect all types of attacks and help you prioritize and prevent them.
6. Duplicative Processes Reduce
As mentioned earlier, attackers change their tactics often. But, the basic security best practices remain the same every day. If you hire someone to handle these tasks, they may get bored along the way. Or they could feel tired and complacent and miss an important security task and expose your network.
AI, while mimicking the best of human qualities and leaving out the shortcomings, takes care of duplicative cybersecurity processes that could bore your cybersecurity personnel. It helps check for basic security threats and prevent them on a regular basis. It also analyses your network in depth to see if there are security holes that could be damaging to your network.
7. Accelerates Detection and Response Times
Threat detection is the beginning of protecting your company’s network. It would be best if you detected things like untrusted data quickly. It will save you from the irreversible damage to your network.
The best way to detect and respond to threats in time is by integrating AI with cybersecurity. AI scans your entire system and checks for any possible threats. Unlike humans, AI will identify threats extremely early and simplify your security tasks.
8. Securing Authentication
Most websites have a user account feature where one logs in to access services or buy products. Some have contact forms that visitors need to fill with sensitive information. As a company, you need an extra security layer to run such a site because it involves personal data and sensitive information. The additional security layer will ensure that your visitors are safe while browsing your network.
AI secures authentication anytime a user wants to log into their account. AI uses various tools such as facial recognition, CAPTCHA, and fingerprint scanners amongst others for identification. The information collected by these features can help to detect if a log-in attempt is genuine or not.
Hackers use credential stuffing and brute force attacks to access company networks. Once an attacker enters a user account, your whole network could be at risk.
Trends of AI in Cybersecurity
1. AI Will Reduce Burden of Cybersecurity Worker Shortage
As workers around the world were sent home from their offices to work remotely in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, cybercriminals were already lying in wait, ready to exploit vulnerabilities widened by the mass influx of unsecure network connections. Those same tactics have played out across the SecOps field, which has been dealing with a significant skilled worker shortage for several years.
(ISC)2 estimates the cybersecurity market is in need of about 3 million qualified workers, according to its 2020 Cybersecurity Workforce report. Additionally, the report shows 64% of the cybersecurity professionals surveyed said their organization is impacted by the cybersecurity skills shortage.
When SecOps teams are lacking in staffing, vulnerabilities naturally increase. No human could keep up with every viable threat, as cybercriminals know.
AI is playing a role in these situations. Sophisticated AI-driven algorithms can recognize patterns of attacks, suspicious email activity, and identify the most vulnerable network endpoints. AI can also tackle repetitive, error-prone tasks, like data labelling, and generate automated reports for human analyst review. All of these features will help to reduce SecOps teams’ bandwidth, so team members can focus on other security functions.
2. AI Will Automate Identity and Access Management Security Measures
Identity and access management (IAM) is becoming more important than ever with the increased adoption of zero-trust security frameworks, which require every network user to be authenticated, authorized, and continuously validated.
AI can greatly reduce the amount of manual labour required to carry out these goals by introducing smart automation into security systems. AI can monitor and analyse user activities, including typing and mouse movements. It can also power supervised algorithms and unsupervised learning, both of which help SecOps teams identify anomalous behaviour.
AI can improve security across the customer authentication experience as well, from the point of account creation and login to interacting with service accounts. AI monitoring of these activities helps organizations to assign risk scores related to potentially suspicious events, instead of simply locking users out or terminating their connections mid-session. This more nuanced approach improves efficiency and helps analysts zero in on genuine threats.
3. AI Will Improve Blockchain
Blockchain adoption has been increasing dramatically, as cryptocurrencies have become more widely understood. Grandview Research values the global blockchain technology market size at around $3.67 billion in 2020 and expects that figure to skyrocket, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 82.4% from 2021 to 2028.
Bitcoin and other crypto coins are built on blockchain solutions that keep transactions secure and decentralized. Blockchain is also used within the medical field to better secure and monitor access to electronic records.
Advances in AI-powered blockchain have reduced the need for time-consuming secure sockets layer (SSL) and transport layer security (TLS) “handshake” methods that involve verification keys. Instead, newer systems can analyse data chains in bulk using high-powered AI, which is a much faster and far more secure process overall.
4. AI Will Enhance Regulatory Compliance Efforts
AI can apply regulatory rules and requirements to data across complex networks, which is a quicker, more fool proof compliance method versus manual search processes.
AI-based data processing will be critical as over 300 million new regulations are expected over the next decade, according to LogicGate.
Enterprises can use AI to track regulatory agencies worldwide to help monitor and maintain ongoing compliance, as rules change and new rules are adopted, LogicGate says.
5. AI Will Improve Cloud Network Security
As more organizations move portions of their data to the cloud, cybersecurity has become more complex. Many legacy systems are incapable of monitoring cloud data, but newer AI-enhanced cybersecurity is specifically designed for the cloud.
Hybrid cybersecurity solutions involving AI that are able to monitor and analyse data across multiple environments will become a must. Many organizations have been getting by with an ad hoc approach, where enterprise data is pulled from various architectures, compiled, and then analysed by a software platform. Not only are these approaches complicated and expensive, they are also prone to missing important data.
6.Battling Bots
Bots make up a huge chunk of internet traffic today, and they can be dangerous. From account takeovers with stolen credentials to bogus account creation and data fraud, bots can be a real menace.
You can’t tackle automated threats with manual responses alone. AI and machine learning help build a thorough understanding of website traffic and distinguish between good bots (like search engine crawlers), bad bots, and humans.
AI enables us to analyse a vast amount of data and allows cybersecurity teams to adapt their strategy to a continually altering landscape.
Conclusion
Keeping your data and network secured isn’t easy in today’s business environment. You can take a decisive step towards being safer by adopting AI to strengthen your security infrastructure. There are several benefits of using AI for business security and we anticipate that very soon artificial intelligence will become an integral part of business cybersecurity.
Authors-
- Aditya Dere
- Anushka Ahire
- Mandar Ambulkar
- Daksh Dagariya
- Vedant Jore
References
