How artificial intelligence is influencing the arms race in cybersecurity

The average business receives 10,000 alerts every day from the various software tools it uses to monitor for intruders, malware, and other threats. Cybersecurity staff often find themselves inundated with data they need to sort through to manage their cyber defenses.

The stakes are high. Cyberattacks are increasing and affect thousands of organizations and millions of people in the U.S. alone.

These challenges underscore the need for better ways to stem the tide of cyber-breaches. Artificial intelligence is particularly well suited to finding patterns in huge amounts of data. As a researcher who studies A.I. and cybersecurity, I find that A.I. is emerging as a much-needed tool in the cybersecurity toolkit.

Helping humans

There are two main ways A.I. is bolstering cybersecurity. First, A.I. can help automate many tasks that a human analyst would often handle manually. These include automatically detecting unknown workstations, servers, code repositories, and other hardware and software on a network. It can also determine how best to allocate security defenses. These are data-intensive tasks, and A.I. has the potential to sift through terabytes of data much more efficiently and effectively than a human could ever do.

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