A midsized organization receives notifications for more than 200,000 cyber events every day, according to TechRepublic. An ordinary company's security team will be unable to handle these large volumes of attacks.
For security professionals to perform effectively and defend their organizations from cyberattacks, emerging technologies like AI are essential.
The role of AI in cybersecurity is massive and is continuing to rise. According to a recent study, the AI-based cybersecurity products market is projected to reach around $133.8 billion by 2030. This is up from $14.9 billion in 2021.
Artificial intelligence systems can be taught to produce alerts for dangers, recognize novel malware strains, and safeguard critical data for organizations if properly harnessed.
The Anatomy of AI in Cybersecurity
In recent years, there has been a lot of data storage due to the growth of IoT (Internet of Things), cloud storage, and an increase in internet users. It is difficult to keep a large volume of data while maintaining privacy.
Enter: AI. AI defends you against prospective cyberattacks and hinders any potential hacking attempt.
The three primary attributes of AI are:
- Continuous learning - Deep learning and machine learning make it simple to comprehend how networks behave.
- Managing enormous amounts of data - AI is capable of processing large amounts of data and identifying patterns.
- Removing similar tasks - A lot of cyberattacks follow the same pattern, and AI is skilled at spotting these trends.
Using AI in Cybersecurity
Many cyber issues can be resolved by an AI-based cybersecurity system that is self-learning. It is technologically possible to correctly hone a learning system that can autonomously and continuously collect data from all of your corporate information systems.
Following data analysis, pattern recognition across billions of signals pertinent to the attack surface is performed. As a result, human teams working in many cybersecurity domains are given new intelligence levels, including:
- Gaining a thorough, accurate inventory of all hardware, software, and users with information systems access known as IT asset inventory. Inventory categorization and business criticality measurement are also very important.
- Threat Exposure: Just like everyone else, hackers follow trends, so what's in style with them changes frequently. AI-based cybersecurity solutions can offer current information on regional and sector-specific threats to assist in prioritizing crucial actions based not just on what attacks are used but also on attacks that are expected to be used.
- Effectiveness of Controls: To maintain a high level of security, it is critical to comprehend the effects of the various security instruments and security procedures you have used. AI can assist in identifying the areas of your program's strengths and weaknesses.
- Breach Risk Prediction: AI-based solutions can forecast the way and places that are likely to be attacked, taking into account your IT asset inventory, threat exposure, and controls efficacy. This allows you to allocate resources and tools to your weakest points in advance. You may create and optimize policies and processes to more effectively increase your organization's cyber resilience by using prescriptive insights from AI analysis.
- Incident response: AI-based systems can offer a better framework for ranking and answer to security warnings, quick responses to events, and revealing primary causes to reduce vulnerabilities and prevent future problems.
- Explainability: It is crucial when using AI to support human information security teams. This is achieved by making recommendations and analyses more comprehensible. This is crucial for gaining support from all relevant parties inside the organization, comprehending the effects of different information security programs, and for reporting pertinent data to all concerned parties, such as end users, employees, and the board of directors.
What Distinguishes AI from Data Analytics?
Companies all across the world have obviously joined the AI bandwagon given how AI has already revolutionized industries throughout the world.
Although some companies promote their products as AI tools, the programs they most frequently provide are ones that are useful for data analysis. Although they complement one another, AI and data analytics are still separate branches of computer science.
Understanding the distinction between artificial intelligence and data analytics is crucial since the term "AI" is being used more in marketing, public relations, and advertising.
Drawing insights and prediction ideas from a huge information spectrum is what data analytics entails. Business executives and marketers can better target their desired consumers by using the massive amounts of information that data mining produces.
Predictive analytics, carefully crafted hypothetical scenarios based on data generated from past events, can also be informed by these data collectors. In general, data analysis is a static process that excludes self-learning.
However, as they analyze data and learn from their mistakes, AI algorithms get smarter and better over time. Predictive analytics principles are somewhat implemented by AI and ML, but they continuously self-evaluate and change models without human interaction. Iterative and adaptive systems include AI and ML.
Advantages of Using AI in Cybersecurity
- Identification of Unknown Threats
Hackers launch millions of cyberattacks annually for various reasons. These attacks can seriously harm the company network. Even worse is the damage they may cause before you can find, recognize, and stop them.
It is essential to adopt contemporary solutions to stop attackers as they experiment with new strategies, such as virus attacks and sophisticated social engineering. Artificial Intelligence is the best security tool for recognizing and avoiding unforeseen attacks from destroying a business.
- Prediction of Breach Risk
The IT asset inventory, which is a precise and thorough list of all devices, users, and apps with various levels of access to various systems, is determined with the use of AI algorithms.
AI-based solutions can estimate how and where you are most likely to be compromised based on your asset inventory and threat exposure, allowing you to plan and direct resources to regions with the greatest risks.
Your ability to build and enhance policies and procedures to strengthen your cyber resilience is made possible by prescriptive insights from AI-based analysis.
- Identify Bots
Bots are developing very quickly. For many organizations, they are starting to cause major issues.
Bots can use accounts with stolen data by setting up pretentious accounts. One of technology's most important developments has turned into a serious threat to the technology itself.
Cybersecurity specialists will face a formidable challenge in combating bots and safeguarding data. AI can identify patterns that are distinct from typical user trips and identify bots.
AI and machine learning can discriminate between good and dangerous bots with enough data. This will put in place a defense against malicious bots, which could pose cybersecurity risks.
- Accelerate Detection and Reaction Times
Identifying risks is the first step in protecting the network of your business. The ideal situation would be if you could quickly identify things like suspect data. It will safeguard your network from long-term harm.
The best method to identify dangers in real-time and take action is to integrate AI with cybersecurity. Artificial intelligence checks the security of your entire system. Unlike human intelligence alone, AI in cyber will identify problems early, resulting in quicker and more precise security alerts and streamlining the work of cybersecurity experts.
- Handle Large Amounts of Data
A large amount of data will be transmitted daily within a company. As a result, this data must be protected against hackers and attacks. However, cybersecurity experts cannot monitor all communications for potential attacks.
The greatest way to find threats disguised as everyday behavior is through artificial intelligence. AI can scan through large volumes of data quickly due to automation. AI-based technology can also detect and locate any threats concealed among the sea of frantic traffic.
- Lower Expense of Finding Breaches
The cost of detection and analysis will gradually decrease as more labor is combined into a single AI system. Some businesses have even been able to cut expenditures by over 15%. AI can assist in eliminating a significant number of recurring tasks and human errors, and also saves plenty of resources and time in addition to money.
Final Thoughts
AI has become a necessary piece of technology for supporting the work of security teams. AI provides analysis and threat detection that can be used by cybersecurity teams to decrease breach risk and strengthen security posture because humans can no longer scale to sufficiently guard the dynamic enterprise attack surface.
Without AI, consumer cybersecurity cannot exist in the future, especially given the scope and threat of IoT malware and social engineering.
