If the purpose of technology is to improve the lives of humans – to assist in everyday tasks, accelerate processes and keep us safer – we must also reckon with an inconvenient truth: Technology can also be used to exploit those efforts and cause a great deal of harm.
This is happening already, of course, with the quest for technological advancement creating more solutions while simultaneously giving rise to more risk and the good guys stay engaged in a constant arms race to keep up with the bad guys. In that sense, artificial intelligence is a double-edged sword. But given that AI has already been pulled from the scabbard, so to speak, organizations across all industries – rather than waste time lamenting its dangers – would do well to learn how to wield it.
Cyberattacks are indeed increasing in frequency and sophistication across industries, regions and technologies. But while fears of AI introducing more cybersecurity risk aren’t entirely unfounded, plenty of applications of AI exist that ultimately enhance cybersecurity functions – if executed correctly.
Acknowledging the Current Challenges of Cybersecurity
As more application services are being used across industries and as tech surfaces continue to grow at an almost exponential rate, the risk of exposure to cyberattacks has burgeoned at a similar pace. More surface means more exposure. Greater usage means greater opportunity for bad actors to gain a foothold. Again, with technological progress comes change that must be accounted for, often with new tools, protocols and best practices – all of which must be managed and kept up to date over time.
That job has become unwieldy, to the point of being nearly impossible, when carried out by humans. Organizations with small IT teams and no institutional knowledge of cybersecurity are almost completely at a loss in these situations. Even the most seasoned SOC analysts can struggle to keep up with the number and evolving nature of cyber threats. Despite the advantage of data consolidation and a single-pane system, analysts can be bombarded by regular threats and affected by alert fatigue. More help is needed.
AI as the Future of Cybersecurity
As cyber threats continue to multiply in number and complexity for organizations of all sizes and across industry, one of the best countermeasures to neutralize the risk will be the assistance of artificial intelligence technology. Think of it as fighting fire with fire: Facing increasingly frequent and sophisticated cyber threats created in part by tech innovation, organizations can leverage those same advances to thwart these attacks with the assistance of AI.
For example, newly deployed or unpatched firewalls can introduce certain new vulnerabilities that are at heightened risk of being exploited. But to address these emerging threats, custom machine learning models can be written to search for anomalies, providing the processing power that an army of humans couldn’t hope to match and delivering more accurate and targeted alerts as a result.
Rather than putting unreasonable demands on humans to cultivate an expertise on increasingly diverse data sources – different products, different problems – organizations will be able to rely on AI-driven cybersecurity tools that quickly analyze data sets, develop insights and summarize that information in meaningful ways. The use of machine learning and detection algorithms to process and then present digestible and actionable information to analysts figures to represent the next significant stride in global cybersecurity.
The Human Element Remains Essential in Cybersecurity
Existential concerns about the role of artificial intelligence in cybersecurity are similar to those for AI in nearly any other vertical or industry. Even if robot takeovers and other sci-fi-inspired fears are far-fetched, trepidation about the use of new tech in a high-stakes setting is perfectly understandable. If technological innovation is the cause of the problem, how can it also be trusted as the solution?
Simply put, it’s because neither are true. Tech, as always, is a tool. It is people who are behind cyber attacks – but also people who can ultimately help prevent them. Even as the arsenal of instruments and tactics used by cyber attackers is sharpened and grows, the greatest cybersecurity risk remains human error – impulsiveness, negligence and a lack of knowledge. But at the same time, it is humans who can – and should – address these issues.
Ongoing cybersecurity training, testing and oversight should be required programming for every organization that relies on as little as a laptop and an internet connection. Human error remains the greatest weakness of any organization’s cybersecurity posture, but addressing that risk through human methods also goes at least as far to galvanize an organization’s cyber protection as any tech tools or services could do.
It is people, too, who are the final arbiters of cybersecurity intelligence. Machines are responsible for processing, categorizing and pattern recognition, but they are not decision-makers. AI can collect and distill data and information, but insight, discovery and action can only come from people, who will always be the critical end users in any cybersecurity operation or infrastructure.
