The New Age of Cybersecurity: How AI Can Make Your Systems Safer and More Secure

Artificial intelligence tools are rapidly becoming a friendly face in many areas of business. They help crunch data and come up with strategic ideas in analytics tools, analyse marketing information and can suggest product or advert improvements, all while helping save lives through rapid analysis of scans for cancer and other patients in hospital systems.

With the massive volume of business data flying between clouds, the huge number of network requests and the staggering amount of daily hacking attempts, scam emails and other threats, the increasing use of AI in cybersecurity is no surprise. With most businesses linked to the internet and clouds, the volume of information makes manual efforts at cybersecurity both impossible and untenable.

Artificial intelligence is a term that creates many different images in people’s minds, but when it comes to cybersecurity, think of it as the fastest thinking ally when it comes to identifying and tracking threats. Its use comes at a time when many businesses can’t afford expert cyber security staff and where qualified professionals are in short supply, making an AI service the only choice for many.

Where AI is ahead of the game

Plenty of cloud and internet security tools already make use of AI to analyse threats and look for variations of existing attacks that traditional antivirus software would fail to identify. They also look for fake data packets or user accounts that might be used to gain access to business services and inconsistencies in updates or patches that might pose a threat.

Many recent hacks have been caused by hackers breaking into cloud service provider applications and sending out fake updates or patches that breach huge numbers of companies, creating huge levels of disruption and damage from a single source. AIs will learn to identify and monitor these types of activity and shut them down before damage can occur.

In other cases, AI can monitor the gateways to a business and identify digital attempts to deceive traditional security applications.

On top of this, AI is always switched on, always learning about new threats and constantly sharing that knowledge with other services and experts to improve business defences. Security services spend a lot of time diving into the latest threats and understanding how they impact businesses.

For example, FortiGuard Labs explores threat intelligence and research, using the expertise of threat hunters, researchers, analysts, engineers and data scientists to provide customers with intelligence and protection from malicious cyberattacks. With 24-hour monitoring and analysis, these services ensure security applications are kept up to date against the very latest known threats.

The key benefits of AI in cybersecurity

Hackers are always trying new tricks or varying their approaches. AI can identify even tiny variations or link attacks to specific sources and sound the alarm. They do this without slowing down business data travelling over networks, meaning they don’t have a major impact on operations.

These tools can help provide security within the business, too. From vulnerability management to identifying risks within the business devices or services like unpatched applications, printers and network routers, everything is a potential weakpoint.

AI also speeds up the time it takes to detect and respond to attacks in progress, limiting any damage that may be caused. As an ever-watchful guardian, AI can spot people misusing business data or trying to send it outside the business. Traditional tools take a rules-based approach to these efforts, but AI can spot all sorts of new or inadvertent ways workers might try to get around the rules.

Many big-name cybersecurity firms are adopting AI tools, while a new generation of startups is using AI in clever ways to prevent hacks or limit data fraud efforts. From threat identification to analytics and phishing blockers, there are solutions for most threats, and these will become a common part of all business and cloud security applications over time.

With many security applications and services in use across a business, AI can also work agnostically, checking out whatever data travels across the network regardless of application or use case. This is important as companies can adopt various security tools from different vendors for network security, firewalls, cloud access security brokers and other areas as part of their security profile.

In the daily battle against human error, hackers and automated attacks, AI provides a key part in keeping company data and networks secure, something which would have been an impossible job for a human or a traditional application that is only patched daily or less frequently, all when the battle lines are now changing by the second.

While some business leaders and users might fear the phrase “AI”, its value far outweighs old-fashioned notions, but vendors do need to do a better job of explaining how it helps in the fight against threats. However, AI will never totally replace human efforts, especially when it comes the broader security landscape, so IT operators shouldn’t be concerned about deploying it as more services come loaded with AI to support their efforts.

And as hackers start to use AI of their own that adapts and changes to outfox business AI, companies without any AI defences will be powerless in the next phase of the security battle. Learning more about AI and how it can protect your business will be a key issue for technology leaders and operators today, as by next year it could easily be too late as breaches and hacks happen faster and have increasingly serious consequences for firms of all sizes, regardless of what they do as a business.

Further reading:

• Applying Artificial Intelligence to Cybersecurity Beyond the Hype
• 10 UK Cybersecurity Statistics that SMBs Need to Know for 2021
• Know Your Vulnerabilities: Get the Facts About Your Network Security
• Secure Remote Working for SMB's