AI in Cyber Security: Use Cases, Advantages

Artificial intelligence acts both as a boon and a curse to customers, businesses, and cybercriminals alike. 

Intelligence technology provides us with speech recognition technology like Alexa and Siri. It is also used by Google’s search engine and Facebook’s facial recognition software. There are many credit card companies that have started to use AI technology in helping financial institutions to prevent frauds of billions of dollars annually. But the major question arises about why do we use the concepts of AI and machine learning in cyber security and what are applications in cyber security? Is it an advantage or a threat to any organization’s digital security? 

Cyber Security- An Overview

What is Cyber Security?

When we protect the devices which are connected by the internet, this process is called Cybersecurity which includes protecting hardware, software and data from the threats of cybercriminals. Individuals and organizations use this practice to protect against unauthorized access to data centers and other computerized systems. The cyber security personnel need best cyber security training to identify and stop any attacks from taking place on the system. We need a strategy in cybersecurity that is strong enough for a good security practice against some of the malicious attacks which are crafted in order to access, tamper, delete, extort or destroy the data of an organization or individual systems and steal sensitive data. The most instrumental part which prevents cyber-attacks from happening aiming to weaken or disrupt a system’s or device’s operations is cybersecurity.

Importance of Cyber Security

Nowadays, the number of users who are using devices and programs have increased considerably in the modern enterprise that generates a large amount of data, many of which are sensitive or confidential. Thus here comes the importance of cybersecurity as in this age, the data theft on these systems continues to grow. The increase in volume and more sophistication in methods which are used by the cyber attackers through many attack techniques create many problems even further. 

Components of Cyber Security

The cybersecurity field can be divided into various components based on the type of security it is providing on the device and the integration of all of these within the company is very important for the cybersecurity program to succeed. These include the following components: 

1. Application security 
2. Information or data security 
3. Network security 
4. Disaster recovery/business continuity planning 
5. Operational security 
6. Cloud security 
7. Critical infrastructure security 
8. Physical security 
9. End-user education 

Working in Cyber Security field

Maintaining cybersecurity is a challenge for all organizations in this threat landscape which is constantly evolving. In Traditional reactive approaches, the resources were put towards protecting systems against the biggest known threats, while lesser-known threats were undefended, which is no longer a sufficient tactic. A more proactive and adaptive approach is necessary in order to keep up with changing security risks. There are several key cybersecurity advisory organizations that recommend good guidance. Like if we adopt continuous monitoring and perform assessments in real-time, it can help us to defend if any known and unknown threats occur, as part of a risk assessment framework and is also endorsed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). 

Benefits of Cyber Security

There are several benefits in the field of cybersecurity 

• We can protect businesses against cyberattacks and data breaches. 
• We can protect data and networks. 
• We can prevent unauthorized user access. 
• The recovery time is improved even after a breach. 
• It protects us for endpoint devices and end users. 
• It has regulatory compliance. 
• It assures continuity of business. 
• The confidence in the reputation of an organization gets improved. 

Top Cyber Security Challenges

Cybersecurity is challenged continuously by the hackers who are responsible for data loss. Moreover, privacy, risk management and changing cybersecurity strategies also pose a threat. The number of cyberattacks taking place is not expected to decrease in the near future because more and more people are getting access to the internet. Furthermore, with the arrival of the internet of things (IoT) the entry points for attacks increase the need to secure networks and devices. 

The evolving nature of security risks is one of the most problematic elements of cybersecurity. With the advent of new technologies, it is used in new or different ways, and new attack avenues are developed. In order to keep up with these frequent changes, advances in attacks and the practices of updating to protect against them, can be challenging. Issues include ensuring all elements of cybersecurity are continually updated to protect against potential vulnerabilities are difficult for smaller organizations without the staff or in-house resources because of the lack of manpower and investment. 

Role of AI in Cyber Security 

When we discuss artificial intelligence in cyber security it is nothing new. In fact, two years ago, in forums people would discuss how artificial intelligence and machine learning in cyber security would change the future as data is at the central part of cyber security trends. You can get CEH v12 training online in order to learn about various cyber security related topics and threat landscape.

In cyber security, artificial intelligence proves to be beneficial as it improves the way security experts analyze, study, and understand cybercrime. It improves the technologies that companies use to combat cybercriminals and helps organizations keep customer data safe. But, on the other hand, artificial intelligence can be a very exhaustive resource and may not be practically applicable in every application. Most importantly, it can also serve as a new weapon for cybercriminals who may use this technology to sharpen their techniques and improve their cyberattacks.

Need for AI in Cyber Security 

It is impossible for a normal human to identify and block all the threats faced by a company because of the fact that every year, hackers find out a different way to launch various types of attacks that have a distinct objective. For example, in earlier times log4j was not known though it was present from the beginning, finally, it was reintroduced in December 2021. The network can suffer massive damage with the introduction of these new types of unknown threats and they can have a deep impact on the organization if you fail to detect, identify, and prevent them. 

AI in Cyber Security: Benefits

1. Artificial Intelligence becomes more intelligent over Time 

The technology of Artificial Intelligence is more efficient and intelligent, as the name suggests, because of its ability by which it improves network security over a period of time. To learn more about an organization’s network behavior over a period of time, artificial intelligence takes the help of machine learning and deep learning. The patterns which are present on the network are recognized by them and after recognizing, the AI technology clusters them together and then it further proceeds to find out if there were any deviations or if any security incident occurred in the normal traffic. After analyzing the traffic it finally responds to them. 

2. Artificial Intelligence helps us in identifying unknown Threats 

It becomes necessary to switch to modern solutions in order to prevent new attacks from damaging the system owing to the increase in malware attacks in sophisticated social engineering, the attackers try new methods to cause harm to the system. In order to detect and stop unknown threats from ruining an organization’s network infrastructure, artificial intelligence imbibed in cyber security proves to be one of the best combinations for security technologies. 

3. Artificial Intelligence Can Handle a Lot of Data 

Artificial intelligence comes into the picture to detect any possible threats that are being masked as a normal activity and it proves to be the best solution as it is very helpful. It basically reads through the large volumes of data and analyzes the traffic in order to detect any possible threats because of its automated nature which allows it to do so. A residential proxy is a technology that uses the technology of Artificial Intelligence and helps us in the transferring of data. Moreover, it can also perform detection and identify any threat which may be present in the traffic. 

4. Artificial Intelligence can manage vulnerability better 

Artificial Intelligence is faster and can help us assess our systems more quickly than the cybersecurity personnel, thereby decreasing our workload and increasing our problem-solving ability by multiple times as it identifies the weak points in computer systems and business networks and helps businesses to focus on more important security-related tasks. This makes it possible to manage vulnerability and secure business systems in time. 

Adversarial Use of AI

AI has the potential to improve with time by utilizing Machine Learning and Deep Learning. As the name suggests, Machine Learning has been mushrooming to advance technology far beyond our thinking capacity. Self-learning technologies are used for data analysis and pattern recognition with a minimum of human interaction. To combat the surging cyberattacks and malware threats, many IT organizations are now deploying artificial intelligence within their businesses. Data collected daily from in-house and third-party AI is increasing exponentially. As evidenced by more frequent data breaches, these large data pools are highly sought-after targets for cybercriminals. In firewalls and anti-malware products. It is becoming increasingly difficult for cyber analysts to monitor threat sophistication. 

AI is used in cyber defense to: 

• With incident response, you can reduce vulnerabilities and potential threats 
• Cyberattack prevention trends. 
• Boost the efficiency and resilience of your business. 
• Strengthen control by knowing how security software and tools work. 

Real-life Use Cases of AI in Cyber Security

Security screening done by customs officers can help them to distinguish which individuals are lying. In the United States, a framework called AVATAR has been devised by the Department of Homeland Security that screens body motions and looks of individuals. It uses the technology of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Big Data to detect even the slightest variation of looks and body motions which may be doubtful. The framework consists of a screen that comes with a virtual face that seeks clarification on suspicious issues. Their answers and voice tones are monitored. Data collected is compared to elements that could indicate that someone is lying. If a passenger is deemed suspicious, he or she is flagged for further inspection. 

Future of Artificial Intelligence in Cyber Security

The key to securing an organization’s network is vulnerability management. An average company has to deal with many threats daily and it firstly has to detect them, then identifies the type of it and take necessary countermeasures to prevent all of them in order to be safe from any type of damage. In order to manage all the vulnerabilities, we need to analyze and then assess the security measures which are available to us through AI research which can prove to be a great help. 

In the future, the security of an organization or a system can be improved with the help of artificial neural networks by learning the patterns in due course of time. It searches basically for potential threats which follow a similar trait and the threats which get detected are blocked very early enough. The technology of artificial intelligence when applied with cyber security makes it difficult for hackers to hack something due to the fact that AI keeps learning through various situations which makes it difficult for them to beat its intelligence as the system keeps on improving over the phase it is learning. 

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Conclusion

An average mid-sized startup or a company faces huge traffic because there is a lot of activity that is happening on the company’s network. This means a lot of data is transferred between customers and the servers of the organization on a daily basis. The data which is transferred has to be protected from hackers so that they cannot read or tamper with this data which may lead to collateral damage for the user and the organization. It becomes impossible for cyber security personnel to check all the traffic to detect some possible threats. 

Artificial intelligence is quickly arising as a high priority innovation for improving the performance of IT security groups. Knowledgehut best cyber security training provides the cyber security individuals a good understanding of computer networks. People can never again scale to sufficiently secure an enterprise-level attack surface and AI gives the genuinely necessary analysis and threat identification proof that can be utilized by security experts to limit breach risk and upgrade security posture. 

In addition, AI can help to discover and focus on risks, direct incident response, and distinguish malware attacks before they come into the scenario. Thus, even with the expected drawbacks, AI will effectively drive cyber security forward and it will assist the organization in practicing a more powerful security posture. You can get in order to know more.