For a while now, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning(ML) have been fueling the automated services sector and increasing the productivity of business operations. From the health sector to banking, AI is freeing the human workforce for more skilled and critical tasks. – It is trained to learn, develop and grow based on the data fed to the system which is constantly changing and improving. For organizations wanting to protect company data as a high priority, AI and ML can be of great value to bolster security.
While in the dark world, hackers are always looking for loopholes in the system for breaches. Cybercrime has rapidly evolved into a global marketplace where AI is being harnessed for creating bots and breaking into computer systems.
Let’s unwrap how AI and ML are being leveraged as the two sides of the coin with their positive and negative effects.
Cyber Defence with AI and ML
According to Norton, a data breach recovery costs 3.86 million dollars and 196 days. And if it is a ransomware attack, the cost and damages are beyond estimate. Also, the World Economic Forum says that cyberattacks stand next to natural disasters now, causing physical damage to adversaries’ critical infrastructure. Such ramifications led IT leaders to invest in AI to enable best security practices for organizations.
AI is being configured to learn firms’ specific defenses and tools while ML is deployed for anomaly detection. Additionally, companies are sorting through millions of malware files with machine learning to search for common characteristics and identify new attacks. They are now authorizing legitimate users by analyzing them on parameters like voice, fingerprints, and typing styles; while hunting for clues within suspicious activities to figure out the hacking pathway and taking care of it.
Experts believe that the current iterations of ML have proven to be more effective at finding correlations in large data sets than human analysts. Yet, they cannot replace the human element in cyber and only augment them.
Cyber Attack with AI and ML
On the other hand, the same AI works in the favour of ill-disposed practices. A recent study by Forrester found that 88% of security professionals expect AI-driven attacks will become mainstream. As improving AI can easily deploy malicious algorithms to evade detection, sophistication is getting permissive. This means the destructive potential of cyber-attacks cannot be underestimated.
The introduction of modern-day technologies in cybersecurity has changed how we perceive information. Huge amounts of data necessitated the use of centralized servers for collating the user data via ML and those repositories became a hotspot for hackers scanning for theft. The bad actors are creating tools to mimic human intelligence, emotions, and thoughts. Such programs allow them to behave like a human to breach the walls of security. AI can learn patterns for them and predict and generate fake data which compromises the system’s security.
Above all, the remote working setups during the Covid-19 pandemic have facilitated another mode of cyber hacking. The backdoor attacks have become more frequent as the transitional security for remote setups is still not strong enough to combat the trained machine learning models.
Final thoughts…
It is a fight amongst machines with a double-edged sword for cybersecurity. While we are witnessing how far we can take this technology together, it must be leveraged to investigate, respond, and remediate with speed and intuition.
Strong attacks should be fought with a stronger defense of a proactive approach, industry professionals at your corner, and the updated power of AI.
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