Since the dawn of the now vast Internet, humans have had to deal with a very new and unfamiliar issue, information security. More than ever before, our information is available in some fashion on the internet through social networking sites, online voter records, online transactions, digital footprint, and more. However, information security doesn’t only apply to common individuals. Every year we see approximately a 5% growth in the number of large organizations being compromised by at least one successful hacker attack and we have seen a 4-5 billion dollar increase in the amount of money lost due to malicious hacker attacks. Information Security, or Cybersecurity in a broader sense, has been a major concern for everyone in our more digital world. As citizens of this planet, we must ask ourselves how we can protect ourselves in a harsh digital world and create a more positive digital environment where we don’t have to be afraid of the smallest mistakes. Regardless, the fact remains that we aren’t even close to a complete solution to cyberattacks. However, cybersecurity is being transformed by an element of technology that has already caused major breakthroughs in the digital community, automation.
Artificial Intelligence is one of the fastest growing fields of technology and one of the most far reaching and adaptable fields, integrating with the industrial, medical, technological, and even educational sectors in various ways. The field of Cybersecurity, though very advanced, still relies primarily on a statistical approach and art-based strategies. However, the advent of more advanced digital attack strategies has prompted many major cybersecurity defense organizations to consider the use of predictive models and machine learning to predict the behavior of cybercriminals and attack patterns. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been working with IBM’s Watson AI Program to incorporate Artificial Intelligence into their National Vulnerability Database, which stores data on severe system vulnerabilities worldwide. The NIST, as one of the largest technological and cyber-defense organizations in the world, has shown that Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity can, in fact, have a symbiotic relationship. Predictive automation systems like Intel’s Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) have been used to predict what kind of attacks will be most likely based on data type and to calculate an estimated frequency at which a particular attacker might conduct cyberattacks. This type of automation within the field of Cybersecurity has been revolutionary because it has given cybersecurity the potential to constantly evolve with each cyberattack because information defenses are training on attack data and tuning their parameters to better protect against cybercriminals.
Despite the criticism of many data scientists and organizations, Artificial Intelligence has proven to be a powerful tool in the development of Information Security. It was initially believed that Artificial Intelligence would actually exacerbate the problem of system vulnerabilities due to faulty automation algorithms in cybersecurity that are not properly regulated by humans. However, since the introduction of AI/Machine Learning into the Cybersecurity Industry, trends in Cybersecurity have continued to trend positively, with a projected 32% growth in cybersecurity jobs within the next 5-8 years. Artificial Intelligence in Cybersecurity has truly allowed the realm of cyber defenses to become more reliable in making a vast internet in our society truly viable. Though cybercriminals and malicious attacks in the digital world will always be a problem so long as so much of the world is active in it, the absolutely groundbreaking development of a cross-discipline strategy between AI and Statistical Information Security has proven to have great potential for success and has already changed the way that we deal with digital threats in the 21st century, truly making the world a safer place.
References:
Kazim, Emre, and Adriano Soares Koshiyama. “Human Centric AI: A Comment on the IEEE’s Ethically Aligned Design.” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2020. Crossref, doi:10.2139/ssrn.3575140.
O'Brien, Chris. “Is Ai Cybersecurity's Salvation or Its Greatest Threat?” VentureBeat, VentureBeat, 11 Feb. 2020, https://venturebeat.com/2020/02/11/is-ai-cybersecuritys-salvation-or-its-greatest-threat/.
Stoltz, Ryan. “Cyber Security Job Outlook in 2021.” NEIT Public Website, 4 June 2021, www.neit.edu/blog/cyber-security-job-outlook.
“Visualization and Analysis of the National Vulnerability Database.” NIST, 21 Sept. 2016, www.nist.gov/itl/math/visualization-and-analysis-national-vulnerability-database.