How Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) Used in Cybersecurity?

With its broad capabilities and high levels of computing power, it’s no wonder that professionals are eager to integrate artificial intelligence. In cybersecurity, AI is especially important right now as it’s advancing both cybersecurity solutions and the cyberattacks they’re working to prevent.

AI-powered solutions in cybersecurity can streamline processes, contribute to ideation, improve problem solving and critical thinking, overhaul traditionally manual processes, automate tasks, enhance network defense capabilities, and assist in network monitoring and threat detection and response activities.

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How AI Helps Businesses Defend Against Modern Cyberthreats

AI enhances threat detection, response, and prevention capabilities. Traditional cybersecurity measures often struggle to keep up with the rapidly evolving tactics of cybercriminals. AI addresses this, however, by analyzing vast amounts of data in real-time, identifying patterns, and detecting anomalies.

Machine learning algorithms can learn from past incidents to improve the accuracy of threat detection over time, reducing false positives and ensuring that genuine threats are addressed promptly, even if they’ve never been seen before.

Another significant advantage of AI in cybersecurity is its ability to automate routine tasks, allowing human analysts to focus on more complex and strategic issues. For instance, AI can automatically respond to certain types of threats by isolating affected systems or blocking malicious traffic, thereby containing potential damage and speeding up incident response times.

This automation is crucial in mitigating the damage of cyberattacks, especially those that unfold rapidly.

AI also enhances predictive capabilities by analyzing threat intelligence from various sources to forecast potential future attacks. By understanding the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of cybercriminals, AI systems can help businesses proactively strengthen their defenses against likely attack vectors.

All-in-all, AI's ability to process and analyze large datasets, coupled with its automation and predictive capabilities, makes it an invaluable tool for businesses prioritizing cybersecurity.

Benefits of Using AI in Cybersecurity

There are several benefits to integrating AI technology into cybersecurity solutions, including:

1. Continual Learning
2. Threat Identification
3. Improved Response Times
4. Secure Access Controls
5. Advanced Endpoint Protection

1. Continual Learning

AI uses data to continuously learn and adapt, in turn, improving network security over time—this is referred to as machine learning. For example, AI monitors network activity and behavior to recognize patterns, store them, and then use that information to identify unusual behavior that could indicate malicious activity or the presence of a threat actor.

This consistent adaptation gives a business’ network security a leg up on hackers by establishing an environment in which the machine learning AI understands what normal network activity should look like and can flag anomalies.

Additionally, AI can handle a lot more data than a human team and at a much quicker rate.

Companies with a lot of network traffic have a lot of data to sort through and analyze to find potential threats. AI is necessary for data analysis because it can perform the same job a human can in a fraction of the time.

2. Threat Identification

Between its massive data processing power and ability to reason, AI solutions in cybersecurity greatly improve the threat identification and remediation process. One way AI pushes the envelope in threat identification is in the way it analyzes network patterns to isolate unusual and suspicious behavior.

With a new cyberattack happening every 39 seconds, hackers are constantly throwing unique, automated attacks at businesses and continue to successfully thwart them.

The constant barrage of cyberattacks against unsuspecting organizations is what makes artificial intelligence such a groundbreaking tool when it comes to cybersecurity and network defense. Security tools with integrated AI go beyond recognizing a threat based on historic identifiers.

Rather, AI uses machine learning and advanced algorithms to create predictive models designed to recognize new cyber threats allowing for immediate isolation and remediation.

3. Improved Response Times

Detecting threats is the first step toward repelling an attack. The next is responding as quickly as possible to limit damage and downtime.

AI can analyze extremely large data sets faster and respond to any irregularities instantly, quarantining threats and flagging them to the appropriate stakeholder to review (typically internal IT or the cybersecurity team).

Having a quick response time to cybersecurity incidents minimizes the volume of downtime that your organization may experience and substantially improves your resilience.

In addition to identifying and isolating threats more quickly and accurately, AI can also suggest remediation paths, providing your security team with guidance on how to handle an active cyber incident in real time.

This is especially helpful when considering how inventive threat actors can be when disguising malware, spinning up new variations on old attacks, or developing brand-new threats from scratch.

4. Secure Access Controls

As we’ve mentioned above, AI is excellent at identifying use patterns and discerning if the correctly authorized people are accessing and handling data.

This is evident in AI-based authentication and access controls which limit who can access what, having a machine monitor it all 24/7.

The integration of AI into authentication protocols typically manifests in studying the login behavior of a user. The most common example of this would be flagging when a user is accessing a network from an unexpected location, like a coffee shop out of town instead of the office.

5. Advanced Endpoint Protection

More devices are used by businesses than ever before. Securing all those endpoints has become a challenge, especially when they’re used remotely and on unsecured, public Wi-Fi networks.

AI helps protect endpoints through behavioral monitoring and analysis so it can identify out-of-the-ordinary device use.

With hundreds or even thousands of devices in use by a single business being commonplace, it’s necessary to enlist the help of AI to monitor these devices 24/7 and with a quick response time to stop attacks as fast as possible.

AI on The Other Side

AI is becoming a double-edged sword in cybersecurity. This is because it’s not exclusive to cybersecurity professionals. Rather, security experts and threat actors alike are using artificial intelligence to improve their operations.

Modern threat actors use AI to automate and refine their attacks, making them more sophisticated and harder to detect. AI-driven phishing campaigns, for example, can analyze a target's communication style and generate highly convincing fake emails or messages that bypass traditional security filters.

Similarly, malware powered by AI can adapt to its environment, altering its code to evade detection and exploit new vulnerabilities as they emerge. This level of automation and precision allows cybercriminals to launch attacks at an unprecedented scale and speed. In turn, cybersecurity tools need to be built with AI to match the sophistication of the attacks being launched.

Wrapping Up on AI in Cybersecurity

Using AI in your cybersecurity strategy is simply a must for modern businesses who are looking to develop proactive and comprehensive network defenses that minimize their cyber risk, improve resilience, and offer top-of-the-line detection and response capabilities.

AI can more effectively secure your endpoints, shorten response times to potential threats, and use machine learning to predict attack vectors, find vulnerabilities, and sniff out malicious actors.

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