Is AI the Key to Cybersecurity?

The importance and impact of AI in our society cannot be overemphasized today. It permeates every aspect of our daily life, while cybersecurity is essential in establishing the reliable and trustworthy deployment of AI and therefore it is extremely important to ensure the cybersecurity of AI so that the AI and the set of technologies associated with it are reliable and trustworthy.

The AI threat landscape highlights a number of cybersecurity issues related to complexity, technical issues, integrity, privacy and confidentiality. The transition to secure digital transformation means different steps for different actors and institutions. Accordingly, a set of AI tools should be developed with specific measures to mitigate landscape AI threats based on risk assessments.

Application and adoption of AI increased exponentially during last year as the Covid-19 pandemic forced people, organisations, and governments to rethink everyday tasks. And this is just scratching the surface of what AI and ML can achieve in future. Researchers, labs, and technology companies have innumerable applications of AI across all walks of life planned for the future.

With all the inevitable system integrations and data exchange that is bound to happen, securing systems, applications, personal and companies data, and all other components will be more critical than ever.

AI and ML are key components of the cyber security toolkit. Open-source AI tools used by security teams are easy to compromise. Many of those same machine learning frameworks are available from cloud vendors like Azure or Google Cloud. Almost everyone now have access to ready-made infrastructure to build machine learning models. It will certainly produce a growth in machine learning-driven attacks in the future.

AI is handy in recognizing intrusions the moment they occur. It does this by instantly reviewing the large database of digital footprints that past hackers leave when attempting to access an internal system. Only AI can perform this task so quickly.

Bad actors in cyber security are on a never-ending quest to bring down corporate networks, computer systems of critical infrastructure and their skill sets are formidable. Cyber security teams must follow suit and keep up with the latest skills, technologies and techniques to stay in the game. Nowadays, traditional security measures deployed in organization’s’ architecture simply does not stand up. And the real impact is becoming clearer in the months post-incident. With this in mind, now is the time for everyone to be thinking seriously about the role of AI in security strategy of their systems.