The Future of AI in Defensive Cybersecurity

In cybersecurity, “AI” is frequently used to conceal and impress rather than to explain how various tools and services operate. This is sad since, despite the hype, artificial intelligence plays a crucial part in cybersecurity. AI offers an expanding toolkit for expediting security operations and better detecting risks, even though it won’t be able to fix every issue. AI is already transforming cybersecurity in several ways.

Most cyber-threat detection was done using modest, manually designed pattern-matching tools until the last half-decade. This has altered as a result of AI’s widespread use. Security vendors are currently making great efforts to integrate AI into signature-based detection technology to detect phishing emails, malicious mobile apps, malicious command executions, and other threats.

Security marketing text frequently draws comparisons between signature-based and AI-based detection techniques, but competent security product architects have learned that these approaches work fairly well together. The good news in this situation is that combining AI and hybridizing signatures significantly improves our capacity to identify intrusions, particularly ransomware, which was behind some of the most significant cyberattacks of the past year.

While we may expect cyber adversaries to use AI to their harmful ends with creativity and audacity, AI shouldn’t be the exclusive purview of attackers in cybersecurity. In order to increase cyber attack detection, we must keep making little improvements to the AI we now employ. Instead, the CIOs, CTOs, IT, and SecOps teams must commit to researching fresh and innovative uses for AI technologies that center on assisting the human operators who, in the end, are responsible for our network security in light of the fast-changing and complicated threat landscape we confront.