IBM has announced yesterday that its Watson supercomputer is available for cyber security needs. Therefore IBM’s Watson will be the first supercomputer that combines artificial intelligence and sophisticated analytical software to deter cyber threats.
Technically, Watson is designed to power Cognitive Security Operations centers (SOCs) and is being trained on the language of cyber security.
The researchers have been preparing it from past one year to serve the field of cyber security by ingesting it with over 1 million security documents. Hence, IBM Watson can help security analysts parse thousands of natural language research reports that have never before been accessible to present day’s security tools.
Usually, security analysts sift through 200,000 security events per day on an average, leading to the wastage of over 20k hours per year due to the chase of false positives. In coming years, the anticipated events will double and may also triple on a global note.
IBM researchers want to ease the life of security analysts with the help of Watson. This can be achieved by integrating Watson into IBM’s new Cognitive SOC Platform which will bring advanced cognitive technologies close to security operations giving wider scope to respond to threats across endpoints, networks, users, and cloud.
The highlight of Watson’s platform will be IBM QRadar Advisor, which is the first tool that taps into Watson’s corpus of cyber security insights. The new App is already being beta tested by the researchers of the University of New Brunswick.
David Shipley, the Director of Strategic initiatives for information technology services of New Brunswick University said that his team seeks advice from Watson on 10 to 15 cyber threats each day.
California State Polytechnic, Sun Life Financial, and the University of Rochester Medical Centers are also testing the application.
In order to extend the ability of Cognitive SOC to endpoints, IBM Security is also announcing a new Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solution called IBM BigFix Detect.
BigFix Detect helps organizations gain a full visibility into the evolution of threat landscape. It will also help in bridging the gap between malicious behavior detection and remediation.
The solution is expected to become fully functional by early 2019.
