The scale of cyber-threats is evolving rapidly with thousands of enterprises getting attacked yearly. Cybercriminals are deploying new tactics and intelligent hacking approaches to find loopholes in systems and networks. The global cybercrime damages are estimated to touch the figure of $6 trillion annually by 2021. All this has triggered the cybersecurity industry to evolve and improve significantly. But, when an enterprise has several security risks associated with it, enhancing cybersecurity is no longer a human-level problem to solve. This is where Artificial Intelligence in cybersecurity comes into play. The combined force of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity has emerged to facilitate security teams to depict their security loopholes effectively and have a more enhanced security setup.

Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity

Today, there are some unique challenges associated with cybersecurity, such as hundreds of devices per company, vast and sophisticated attacks, lack of skilled security professionals, and unprecedented amount of data. Owing to such challenges, the traditional approaches of coping with threats need significant improvement. Therefore, Al and machine learning in cybersecurity are becoming essential security elements, as they are capable to inspect millions of events and detect different types of cyber threats in an autonomous and quick way.

Key Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Cybersecurity

AI-based cybersecurity is a self-learning system that independently collects data from all the information systems of the company. After collecting, the AI-based infrastructure analysis the data and carries out patterns correlation across billions of signals related to the company’s attack surface. To further elaborate on the significance of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, below are some key applications of deploying AI in cybersecurity:

• Enhanced Data Center Protection: One of the favorite targets of cybercriminals is the company’s data center. With Artificial Intelligence, the system can learn normal network behavior and then detect any variation that occurs in it. Cybercriminals are constantly developing malware to breach systems mostly relying on signature recognition.  Latest machine learning systems are deploying Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) that play a vital role in detecting such malware.
• Better Exposure to Threats: Hackers are human beings, so they also trigger their activities following the trends. With AI, your cybersecurity system will be receiving up-to-date threats-related information that can help you orient your security systems based on what could possibly be used to attack your company infrastructure.
• Predicting Chances of Breach: An AI-based cybersecurity system can predict the spots in your company’s IT infrastructure where you are most likely to get hit. Such insights will help you configure your security practices in a much efficient way.
• Better Response to Security Alerts: AI-based system can provide more improved responses to security alerts. It can provide a faster response to any security-related incident and provide comprehensive data about the root cause of that incident or alert.
• Effective utilization of Security Tools: With AI-based security, you can not only predict possible vulnerabilities but also make your existing security tools more efficient. An AI-driven system enables you to understand the effect of the security tools and processes you have implemented, along with where they are lagging. With its learning nature, your whole security framework continuously gets analyzed, while useful insights are accessible to you all the time.
• Enhanced Network Security: For any company, network security is one of the most crucial security elements. It involves understanding network topography and setting up security policy accordingly. With AI, the system can learn and observe network traffic patterns and suggest security policies accordingly. Besides that, any abnormalities in a network will be interpreted intelligently by the AI system in order to have a rapid response against them.

The above applications of AI are just a short glimpse of its effectiveness in the cybersecurity industry. AI is capable to create a solid machine and human relation to make them work aligned for addressing the growing security vulnerabilities. As AI is a diversified field that is just getting bigger every year, so the application area of AI and machine learning in cybersecurity is going to grow significantly with the passage of time.

Conclusion

Cybercriminals are utilizing the power of technological advancements to launch new sophisticated attacks on vulnerable systems. Similarly, the cybersecurity sector is also utilizing emerging technologies to cope with new security vulnerabilities. But the amalgam of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity gives companies an additional processing power to predict, detect, and address the evolving cyber threats in a much effective and efficient way.