How AI can shore up cyber security

There’s been an element of AI in use in cyber security since way before it got fashionable 😄 - for years, most anti-virus software has employed heuristics. So rather than just check for viruses that have been defined in a virus dictionary, it can also look for typical behaviours and activities of viruses that haven’t been identified yet, sometimes using your normal computer use as a baseline to measure against.

Modern AI, though, can elevate this to a new level, looking at not only file and process activity but also large scale application usage as a whole, assessing various types of network activity, database usage, and even message bus traffic. It can then compare this to learned typical application behaviour, allowing it to establish and notify or automatically contain any potential risk before it’s had a chance to do any harm.

End users also continue to see improvements in spam detection and malware interception through increasing use of AI in email analysis with Natural Language Processing.

Of course, while system administrators can take advantage of AI as part of their security toolkit, it is also available to those on the other side of the fence, resulting in a constant arms race involving deepfake video and audio for advanced phishing campaigns, along with facilitating the creation of malware with little or no technical knowledge.

We’d love to chat with you about how your business can use AI to enhance cyber security, or to answer any questions you might have!