Artificial Intelligence: a new milestone for Cybersecurity
The combination of computing power together with the availability of immense amounts of information has allowed the development of an ancient human ambition, which is to delegate tasks to machines that until now were only limited to him: the elaboration of predictions in environments complexes and decision making .
With Artificial Intelligence (AI) we are able to interpret
an image and detect a disease, establish a conversation or anticipate risks
much faster than before, such as the risk of non-payment or fraud when
collecting insurance. In the field of cybersecurity , which consists of
avoiding risks around our digital assets, AI also has a wide field of action.
Artificial Intelligence, as a set of predictive and
self-learning techniques, are helping to improve cybersecurity. For this, it
resorts to the continuous calibration of the algorithms as they are exposed to
new information. The degree of complexity and dispersion of the systems with
which companies currently work means that the traditional and manual means of
surveillance, supervision and risk control have proven insufficient.
Furthermore, the very use of AI by cybercriminals makes our systems much
weaker.
How can you improve Cybersecurity with Artificial
Intelligence?
Current applications of AI to cybersecurity are broad:
Thead hunting : identification of threats and neutralization
of cyberattacks. Traditional techniques that rely on the identity or the use of
commitment indicators ( indicators of compromise ) can be seen improved,
closing the security gaps to manage and interpret behavioral indicators.
Vulnerability Management ( Vulnerability Management ). The number of vulnerabilities grows every year and it is not enough to wait for cybercriminals to exploit them to react to them. User and Event Behavioral Analytics (UEBA) allows you to identify anomalous behaviors that signal cyber attack activity even before patches are available to correct vulnerabilities.
Data centers . AI, as in other areas in which it operates,
facilitates the optimization and monitoring of essential data processing
centers as well as helping to detect threats of anomalous behavior. It improves
the use of these resources and their evolution, with the consequent cost
savings and risk reduction, such as the loss of services or the execution of
malicious software.
Network security . Both in the field of policies for action
against user behavior and in the more topographic field when it comes to
identifying which processes correspond to each application, AI allows learning
the behavior patterns of traffic on the network and recommending grouping of
workloads, as well as the application of security policies.
Secure user identification ( Securing Authentication ). Both
for the protection of users who access our services, as well as the set of
elements that they use, AI can identify the use of false identities or brute
force attacks, conferring an additional barrier to fraudulent access to our
services, beyond user authentication or the use of captcha.
Information privacy and compliance . AI helps to
automatically classify information by its level of criticality in the face of
different regulations such as the GDPR . This implies savings with respect to
the efforts that are currently made manually, avoiding the risks that this
entails.
Blocking bots based on their behavior . The activity of the
bots without having to be malicious consumes the bandwidth of our servers,
damaging the user experience of our true clients. AI allows you to classify the
activity of these visitors to limit their action.
These use cases are a reality for the most advanced players
in the digital world, such as Google that introduced AI in cybersecurity in its
Gmail service or IBM / Watson that includes this combination among its security
tools. Other notable cases are those of Juniper Networks or Balbix.
Both because cybercriminals are relying on AI to carry out
their attacks and because of the advantages it provides for the management of
different cybersecurity systems and services, the implementation of security
solutions that use Artificial Intelligence has become a necessity. We will get
better at detecting the bad guys, lower costs for our current levels of
security, and improve the experience for our customers and users.