How AI and Machine Learning Are Helping In Cybersecurity?

The internet is becoming a vital part of our day-to-day lives and with every second that passes by, a new change takes place over the internet. The internet is no doubt a very useful place but there are risks that are associated with the internet, especially those that affect the security and privacy of the users. With the advent of AI and Machine Learning, every process is automated and this is making things convenient for internet users, especially cybersecurity which has improved drastically due to the advent of AI & Machine Learning. AI & Machine Learning can recognize different patterns that are used in data helping the security systems to learn from them.

What is Cybersecurity?

Cybersecurity is the protection of computers, networks, and other similar devices from damage, information theft, or any other harm. Due to the advancement of technology and everything shifting towards the internet and computers, Cybersecurity is an important part of all the sections in the society, be it government section, financial institution, military, or any other section, all of them are driven by data, with large amounts of important data stored on computers and other devices. Most of this is sensitive data that cannot be exposed to the general public and for that reason, cybersecurity is now an essential part of almost every section of society.

The aim of cybersecurity is to prevent the data from being stolen, prevent data breaches along with malware and ransomware attacks. It acts as a protective layer to prevent online frauds and data breaches from happening.

What are Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning?

Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning are data-driven approaches to help the machines make their decision based on the data and patterns given as input without any programming involved. With the help of AI, all the processes become automated and free from any human intervention.

With AI, the data, patterns, and algorithms are given as input on the basis of which the machine performs a specific task and due to this, the precision has improved and the tasks & processes are becoming optimized. With AI and ML, data is mined, patterns are drawn, and based on them the decisions are made concerning both the present and the future.

With the advent of AI & ML, cybersecurity has become automated and risk-free. With the help of AI & ML, the cybersecurity body can easily organize and manage the security of an organization or firm. As AI is all about data classification, clustering, processing, filtering, and management, there are a lot of data points in Cybersecurity that can make use of AI.

How AI and Machine Learning Are Helping In Cybersecurity?

• Threat Hunting

The process of threat hunting has improved significantly with AI. Prior to AI, the traditional security measures such as using signatures or indicators to identify threats were used and they worked well against the previously encountered threats but against threats that haven’t been discovered, they weren’t effective.

Usage of AI with traditional security techniques will results in a 99% threat detection rate with the help of the threat hunting process is greatly enhanced.

• Vulnerability Management

Organizations receive hundreds of new vulnerabilities on a daily basis but they are struggling to manage these large amounts of vulnerabilities. The reason being that the traditional method involves waiting for the exploitation of high-risk vulnerabilities before neutralizing them, so it is basically a way to contain and manage known vulnerabilities.

However, with AI and ML, vulnerability management becomes easier with the help of techniques such as User and Event Behavioral Analytics that can analyze and identify unusual behavior of user accounts, endpoints, and servers, and protect the organization against vulnerabilities before they are reported and patched. This makes the role of AI & ML decisive in vulnerability management and protection against vulnerabilities.

• Hardware Maintenance

The traditional methods involving manpower for the maintenance of hardware are not very efficient and secure. Optimization and monitoring of the data centers' processes like backup power, power consumption, bandwidth usage, and security become much easier with AI due to continuous monitoring capabilities that AI provides resulting in an improvement in effectiveness and security of the hardware, making all the hardware and infrastructure maintenance process much easier.

Along with this, AI also reduces the costs of hardware maintenance by alerting the personnel when to fix or change the equipment or when there is a security vulnerability.

• Combating Hate Speech and Cyberbullying

Technically speaking, this may not be a part of cybersecurity but AI definitely plays a vital role against online abuses and cyberbullying. There are many initiatives available by which specific algorithms can be created and trained that are able to detect hate speech, abuses, & online bullying and prevent them. An example of this is Facebook’s algorithm that uses AI and Machine Learning to identify cyberbullying, hate speech, and online abuses. Chat platforms such as Omegle and Chatroulette are increasingly using machine learning to prevent bad actors in their platforms.

Cyberbullying is a big problem for the victims especially when emotionally unstable people are targeted which can result in them doing self-harm and committing suicide. Cyberbullying can be prevented to a great extent with the help of AI and Machine Learning which is a great asset in recognizing and preventing cyberbullying in all forms.

(Devdiscourse's journalists were not involved in the production of this article. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of Devdiscourse and Devdiscourse does not claim any responsibility for the same.)