A.I. is helping detect cyberattacks. It needs to do more

Last week, popular stock trading app Robinhood revealed another huge data breach. Hackers stole five million customer names, two million customer email addresses, and a lot of more specific, valuable personal information from a smaller set of users. With these kinds of attacks becoming increasingly common, many are hoping that A.I. can play a role in bolstering their cyber defenses.

The good news is that A.I. is increasingly helping. Last week, at Fortune’s Brainstorm A.I. conference in Boston, I moderated a panel on A.I.’s role in cybersecurity with John Roese, the global chief technology officer at Dell, and Corey Thomas, the chariman and CEO at Rapid7, which sells cybersecurity software. Both Roese and Thomas said that A.I. is playing a key role now in helping to detect cyberattacks in most large organizations. Most of these are A.I. systems that learn what a company’s normal network activity looks like, and then detect activity that deviates from business-as-usual.

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