Role of Artificial Intelligence in Cybersecurity

jaro education
24, July 2024
11:00 am

With the advancement of technology, the Internet has become a crucial part of businesses across the globe. Companies have adopted new software, tools, and strategies to support their growth. At the same time, it has become a great challenge to protect company assets from cybercriminals’ attacks. A segment of perpetrators is using the internet and allied technology to commit crimes. Moreover, they are now implementing AI-enabled technologies like deepfake, data poisoning, and more to harm the systems.

Thus, it becomes necessary to learn about the role of artificial intelligence in cybersecurity to develop countermeasures against the use of self-learning technology like artificial intelligence (AI). Notably, AI can accelerate the detection of malicious activities and defend us by mitigating the risks from potential issues.

Enrolling in the Executive Programme in Artificial Intelligence and Cyber Security for Organizations [EPAI&CSO] – IIM Indore offers a valuable opportunity to deepen your understanding of AI in cybersecurity. This programme is designed to equip professionals with the latest skills and knowledge needed to navigate the complex landscape of AI-driven security measures, ensuring organizations are well-prepared to tackle emerging cyber threats. Through a comprehensive curriculum, participants will gain insights from industry experts and academic leaders, making it an ideal choice for those looking to advance their careers in this critical field.

Understanding AI Basics: How AI Does Work in Cybersecurity?

AI, or artificial intelligence, refers to technology that simulates human intelligence and applies it according to the use cases. Thus, AI machines can think like humans, which includes analytical and problem-solving skills.

Undoubtedly this technology is revolutionising almost every industry including the field of cybersecurity. According to recent research, the market of AI cybersecurity products was around $15 billion in 2021, but it will be extended to $135 billion by 2030.

Artificial intelligence in cybersecurity can solve the following tasks efficiently –

Detecting actual potential cyber-attacks, analysing their risks, and prioritising the alerts accordingly.
Simulating the attacks of social engineering helps the security teams to identify the vulnerabilities before the attackers can harm them.
Identify the types of suspicious e-mails, flag them, and send alerts in the phishing campaigns.
Analysing and automating the huge amount of data so that security teams can identify the potential threat from the pile of data.

Organisations use AI’s capabilities with traditional tools like fraud detection, antivirus protection, risk management, data loss prevention, and access and identity management. Moreover, AI helps in penetration testing, which identifies security loopholes in software to protect them.

So, by integrating AI tools in cybersecurity, organisations create robust safeguards and prevent their systems from future attacks. As a result, they can save more costs because they don’t need to repair their systems after security attacks.

*readwrite.com

How Is AI Different from Data Analytics?

Many people think that AI and data analytics are the same things. But, it’s not actually like that. AI is the technology that mimics human intelligence and applies it to different fields. Thus, AI systems can act like humans. They can think, read, analyse data, generate responses, analyse images, perform reasoning, solve puzzles, and more. By using techniques like machine learning, NLP, and more, they can perform these tasks.

On the other side, data analytics helps you identify, visualise, analyse, and detect data patterns automatically and manually to improve business strategies and outcomes. But, data analytics doesn’t mean mimicking human intelligence. Instead, it uses statistical and quantitative techniques to predict, explore, and diagnose the outputs. Using data analytics, you can discover new trends, possibilities, predictions, and more.

So, both AI and data analytics have the same goal of acquiring insights from data. However, AI uses human intelligence to generate the outcomes, and data analytics utilises number- and character-focused quantitative analysis to generate responses. That’s why they differ from each other.

Applying AI to Cybersecurity: Role of Artificial Intelligence in Cybersecurity

AI has the capabilities to perform tasks like learning, problem-solving, creating images, reasoning, and more, than any human can do. Thus, the role of artificial intelligence in cybersecurity includes handling the tasks that require human intelligence and analysis. However, the greatest benefit of using AI is that it can automate tasks that save time and cost and increase efficiency. So, it solves numerous challenges of cybersecurity with multiple techniques like natural language processing, machine learning, pattern recognition, etc. By adapting these techniques, they can simulate human-like functionalities to identify and solve the potential risks of cybersecurity.

So, let’s learn some of those techniques –

- Machine learning (ML): ML is a subset of AI that allows AI models to automatically improve their performance without making any changes in their programming. Also, ML algorithms help AI models detect anomalies and unfamiliar patterns that cause potential security threats in datasets.
- Natural language processing (NLP): NLP helps AI systems read, analyse, and interpret human language. Thus, in cybersecurity, NLP helps analyse texts from logs and threat intelligence reports to collect insights. These insights help identify potential issues.
- Automation: AI-based automation optimises and streamlines random tasks of cybersecurity. It helps to respond quickly and reduces the tasks of human analysts. Also, using the orchestration approach, AI systems automate and accelerate several security processes.
- Predictive analytics: Predictive analytics helps AI systems forecast security threats based on organisations’ ongoing artificial intelligence in cybersecurity trends and historical data. It also helps organisations implement preventive measures to protect themselves from potential threats.

The Risks of Relying on Artificial Intelligence in Cybersecurity

Here are some primary drawbacks of relying on AI for cybersecurity –

Bias in data

AI systems can’t detect biased data and easily consume it. So, if biased data is fed to the system during training, it becomes influenced by that. Hence, it produces inaccurate responses that affect the decision-making of cybersecurity activities.

Vulnerabilities

Hackers can attack AI systems like other software and manipulate them as they want. In this way, they gain access to sensitive data. Moreover, AI systems rely on old data to recognise patterns and make decisions. As a result, hackers can easily access those data and introduce bias, which decreases the accuracy of the systems using artificial intelligence in cybersecurity.

Legal and privacy issues

Artificial intelligence in cybersecurity involves processing and analysing vast amounts of personal data or personally identifiable information (PII), which causes privacy concerns. Thus, it’s crucial to examine those data to ensure the security of the privacy regulations. Otherwise, AI models like ChatGPT face issues when deploying AI-based cybersecurity solutions.

AI hallucinations

Sometimes, AI systems misinterpret information and make decisions based on that wrong information. These are known as AI hallucinations. These AI hallucinations further cause potential cybersecurity threats, which increase the number of false positives. These false positives result in delays in operations, blocking unauthorised users, etc.

Lack of cybersecurity and AI system management skills

Also, the lack of skilled professionals in cybersecurity and AI domains causes several difficulties like misconfigurations, unstable implementations, inefficiency in managing AI systems, inadequate protections, etc.

Real-life Example of Artificial Intelligence in Cybersecurity

Here are some real-life examples of artificial intelligence in cybersecurity –

Threat detection and prevention

Artificial intelligence in cybersecurity has huge applications in threat detection and prevention. By analysing huge amounts of data from various resources and identifying unusual patterns in users’ behaviours, it can easily detect a cyber threat. After detecting the threat, it sends real-time alerts or notifications. Side by side, AI blocks malicious activities or detaches the affected system from the major one.

For instance, an organisation can boost its user accounts’ security and password protection through AI-driven methods like CAPTCHA, fingerprint scanners, or facial recognition. These are the reliable methods of artificial intelligence in cybersecurity, which automatically identify the authorised users. If an unauthorised user tries to log into an account, these methods can detect it and inform the actual user.

Advanced threat detection and mitigation

AI cybersecurity has outstanding capabilities to produce informed responses to cybersecurity threats. While generating these threats, they include network traffic patterns, global threat intelligence, and technical logs, which help organisations understand the severity of threats. These AI-generated cybersecurity threads optimise the time for incident response and help control the organisations’ workloads.

For instance, Wells Fargo has an advanced threat detection system that becomes a strong example of artificial intelligence in cybersecurity. It uses ML algorithms to analyse vast amounts of data from e-mails, files, network traffic, etc. This data helps it detect patterns and anomalies, which then help the system identify potential malicious activities. Then, it can automatically block the malicious traffic or isolate affected files to mitigate the risk.

Predictive analytics and threat intelligence

Artificial intelligence in cybersecurity can predict security risks by collecting data from IT asset inventories, including data from all the devices, applications, and users of an organisation. Harnessing the power of this data and threat exposure assessments, it can predict the most vulnerable security breaches. As a result, security teams can get a comprehensive view of the organisation’s security status, which further helps to improve its cybersecurity strategy.

For example, PayPal’s cybersecurity strategy is a good example of artificial intelligence in cybersecurity which includes predictive analytics and threat intelligence. There are tons of transactions happening through this platform every day, so it becomes impossible to analyse each transaction manually to detect fraud. Thus, PayPal uses AI, which automatically analyses every transaction to find potential threats. Also, PayPal extends its AI cybersecurity strategies to detect and block malicious websites and content.

AI Integrated Cyber Security Shaping the Future

Every organisation wants a robust security system and infrastructure to secure its future. Now, AI has become an undividable part of a sophisticated cybersecurity strategy. So, here are the 5 key takeaways that tell us how artificial intelligence in cybersecurity will provide competitive advantages in the future –

1. The biggest benefit of AI is that it uses automation in cybersecurity. As a result, it becomes easier to handle the routine tasks of the cybersecurity department in every industry, including the government and the Department of Defence.
2. The AI capabilities reduce human errors. Thus, implementing AI technologies in manual and semi-manual workflows can improve accuracy, reduce inconsistencies, and save more time.
3. As AI can predict cyber-attacks, detect malicious activities, and generate alerts for security teams, most countries are using it to enhance security layers in the government and defence sectors to safeguard against possible attacks.
4. Artificial intelligence in cybersecurity will increase the demand for skilled professionals who can handle and manage AI systems in the cybersecurity domain. So, now organisations are focusing on hiring professionals with AI and cybersecurity skill sets instead of hiring people with traditional cyber skill sets.
5. The demand for Artificial Intelligence in cybersecurity has doubled in recent years. Thus, cybersecurity professionals should explore more cases of AI use in the field.

*fortinet.com

Conclusion

So, organizations should enhance their data privacy and risk management efforts by implementing artificial intelligence in cybersecurity. With the help of AI, they can protect passwords and personal data, enhance data privacy, and manage the critical areas of the organization.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is artificial intelligence in cybersecurity important?

Cybercriminals are continuously improving their attacking abilities with the help of AI. Now they are launching large-scale attacks by integrating AI technologies into their workflows. To prevent these attacks, you should utilise AI to analyse large volumes of data, reducing false positives from security alerts and cutting out bottlenecks from security alerts.

What are the major benefits of AI cybersecurity?

The major benefits of AI-based cybersecurity include –

Quickly analysing large volumes of data
Automating the repetitive cybersecurity tasks
Predicting potential attacks and providing messages to the security teams

Mention some important skills required for a professional in AI cybersecurity.

To become a professional in AI cybersecurity, you need knowledge about ML data modelling, language modelling, behaviour analysis, and deep neural networks. For cybersecurity, you need a clear understanding of network security, cryptography, malware detection, data protection, and computer forensics.

Can AI replace human input in cybersecurity?

No, AI can perform specific tasks in cybersecurity, but it can’t completely replace human input.

Can we automate cybersecurity workflows?

Yes, the cybersecurity professionals can automate the mundane tasks with the help of AI.