Keeping online systems secure is getting more challenging, as hackers use advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) for cyberattacks. Cybercrime costs businesses a lot of time and money, and their reputations can be damaged when customers learn there has been a data breach. Companies need an effective way to prevent these security risks.
Cybersecurity has typically depended heavily on human intervention to manually follow up with threats or repair damage from successful attacks. Many Information Technology (IT) professionals are now finding that they can make AI work for them from the defensive side.
How is AI used in security?
AI systems are coded with algorithms to detect existing malware and viruses. When your company’s AI system finds these threats, it can prevent them from entering your database and damaging or stealing information.
How does AI improve cybersecurity?
Coders create defense AI to detect threats to your company’s system. This software can also notice patterns from previous attempted attacks to learn and prevent future attacks.
Do I need to hire IT developers for cybersecurity?
Using AI to strengthen cybersecurity defense is a great choice for your company, but you’ll still need a cybersecurity developer hiring guide to make sure you find the suitable candidate for further assistance and backup.
How Does AI Strengthen Cybersecurity Defense?
Coders create AI systems to meet specific system requirements and then allow AI to learn its environment as threats come in. Technology can train AI systems to pull data from your network to create a baseline to compare regular access to threats.
AI helps strengthen cybersecurity by diminishing the initial threat exposure, predicting and preventing data breaches, responding to incidents, and giving the IT department feedback to stay updated on current cybercrimes.
AI security programs identify new trends and analyze data while allowing IT employees to follow up and update necessary software, authentications, and databases. Josh Lemos, vice-president of research and intelligence at Cylance, a cybersecurity provider, says, “Machine learning is a good fit for anti-malware solutions because machine learning is well suited to solve ‘fuzzy’ problems.”
There are three ways in which AI strengthens cybersecurity defense.
Efficiency
IT teams are often pulled between helping employees with technical issues and monitoring the company’s technology as a whole. When an IT team is short-staffed or overworked, using AI can help them cover their bases. Having a program running non-stop adds a layer of extra security to the business while freeing up IT resources.
AI programs can keep running overnight, on weekends, and during the holidays, keeping a company’s online systems completely secure. Using AI as cybersecurity also saves the business from inconveniencing employees by giving them demanding schedules. It benefits the company by eliminating the need to pay astronomical overtime expenses.
Using AI to strengthen cybersecurity defense starts with having the program learn your company’s regular traffic. The system will factor in what your employees usually do on the network and what hours the network is typically active. AI uses anomaly detection to analyze thousands of visitors to your company’s site or network and assess their threat level.
After getting a baseline standard for your company, AI will look for any outliers and gauge them for threat levels. IT employees can go back into the system and evaluate any flagged items, marking them as genuine threats or safe usage. The AI software will learn from this and adjust its parameters accordingly.
Discovery
Coders create AI systems to discover various threats, such as:
- Malware
- Viruses
- Network interruptions
- Phishing scams
The programs identify the patterns in existing threats and analyze the code to prevent more sophisticated attacks in the future.
You’ll still want to use firewalls and anti-virus software as your company’s base security, but these programs are not updated as often as AI. Anti-virus software is built to prevent known threats and viruses and cannot analyze code and learn how AI does.
Since cybercriminals are also using AI for attacks, using it as a cybersecurity defense means your company’s security can stay on par with the knowledge out there. AI attacks coming into your network will be identified by AI defense since the system will accurately detect such threats.
AI programs address known malware and viruses, and they can block attacks that are trying to break through the infrastructure. AI can flag the information for employees to research so IT will be aware of what threats hackers are using to target their company.
Using AI as the first line of defense cuts down on the IT team’s workload. Investigating the flagged attack attempts frees the IT department to focus on only the data at risk, instead of requiring them to inspect all of the data.
Human intelligence is necessary to identify all real risks since AI will flag anything out of the norm. This method might mean the threat queue has many false positives, but it’s better to be safe than sorry when it comes to your company’s network.
Solutions
The most common forms of AI for cybersecurity defense are Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS). IDS find the threats and rank them according to risk, from low to high. This information is sent to the IT department so they can take action against the threats.
IPS stops hackers and scammers in the act by blocking their IP address. Some IPS can permanently prevent these cybercriminals from accessing the website. These prevented attacks are logged and sent to the IT department, so they know what attempts were made and adjust any security measures accordingly.
Using captchas and authentication methods helps secure your website or network login pages, but AI can add extra security levels to this feature. Since AI can detect viruses and malware coding patterns, this technology can also be used to verify that a user should truly have access to the company’s information.
AI can track the way humans, specifically your company’s employees, type. It tracks the speed and accuracy of their typing and how forcefully they hit keys. Anything abnormal about how someone enters the login credentials will set off an alert for the secure authentication AI program.
Most smartphones have the option of activating facial recognition or fingerprint software to determine if a person should have access to the contents. This method of human authentication can be implemented in a variety of technology.
