Artificial Intelligence is changing our lives daily. As such, the digital security landscape is also undergoing a lot of change. It can be a good and bad thing. Many companies are now increasingly dependent on digital infrastructure. This has also led to the volume of cyber threats escalating beyond what humans are normally capable of.
AI technologies are now important for businesses as they look to fight against threats. At the same time, AI can also empower criminals by making their methods of crime more sophisticated. Today, both security systems and criminals are using AI in order to make their methods of work better.
AI has been rapidly used to develop cybersecurity in recent years. According to McKinsey and Company, the market for AI-enabled security tools will grow annually by 12.7% up to 2027. The report adds that over 70% of large organizations across industries will invest in these technologies.
How does AI enhance cybersecurity defenses?
The machine learning algorithms provided by AI help to strengthen cybersecurity capabilities. These algorithms analyze large amounts of data in order to identify things that aim to compromise systems. While human software developers are still far superior to what AI is capable of, AI can help to identify things that a human may miss due to human error.
Through analyzing network traffic, system logs, and user activities, AI can succeed in detecting previously unknown threats. Humans need to sleep and relax, and while they are doing that, AI systems can monitor for unauthorized access attempts, which can cause security compromises. This allows for security compromises and hacker attempts to be rectified sooner rather than later. AI security tools are continuously getting better. Today, they are already showing effectiveness in solving problems. AI is also already able to analyze data more quickly than human teams in some situations, and it’s only going to get better.
Automated Incident Response is becoming increasingly essential
Because it can be available 24/7, AI is able to respond to threats quicker than humans and can monitor for threats after hours and while humans are asleep. By being combined with Security, Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR), AI is able to solve time-sensitive tasks and eliminate threats. When an AI system identifies security threats, it can do things such as isolate infected endpoints, suspend suspicious user accounts, and block malicious IP addresses.
In the future, there is very likely to be an AI cybersecurity arms race as both attackers and defenders increase their capabilities. The organizations that succeed in navigating this will be those that combine human intervention with AI in equal measure.
AI is also dangerous to cybersecurity
AI, while a good tool in cybersecurity, has also created new forms of threats, some of which are as follows:
Deekfakes- AI is now able to generate convincing video and audio of people, politicians, and even sometimes loved ones nowadays. Impersonators are able to act as loved ones or prominent people in order to gain money. Criminals can also impersonate a CEO over a phone call in order to make a fraudulent wire transfer possible.
Spear Phishing- AI is able to scrape data from the internet faster than a human. It can use the information to craft very personalized emails, not the easily detectable ones that were very generic. It is able to send emails that may appear very convincing and contain your personal information and information about your loved ones.
Data attacks- AI can be used to attack the data that a company uses to train its own AI systems. In doing so, the systems can be poisoned and trained to create misleading information patterns or possibly to compromise the company. This is why the training of AI systems should only be handed to people who are highly skilled and who have good reputations.
AI enables lower-skilled people to become attackers
One of the downsides of hackers is that it could lead to more and more hackers entering the market. It is often said that “AI does things for you,” and this is true. Nowadays, AI can do some lower-level operations itself without human intervention. It can allow lower-skilled criminals to access tools and information on dark web marketplaces. AI marketplaces on the dark web can make it possible for lower-skilled criminals to carry out sophisticated attacks.
What could this mean for the future?
The future of AI is currently unknown. Not even the experts can give you a reliable answer on this. Will it eventually stop developing or overtake human capability? Nobody knows.
One of the current hypotheses is that it could eventually lead to cyberwarfare, where governments at odds with each other use their AI capabilities in order to gain sensitive information about parties and countries that they deem to be enemies. AI may be able to make decisions on attacking and targeting execution faster than a human mind can.
Cybersecurity is aiming to fight back against potential threats by continuously adopting AI in order to keep up to date with the ways in which criminals are using it to refine their methods of execution. The future of cybersecurity is set to be a battle between AI and itself. Human experts on both sides will always be aiming to outdo the other. As humans with each other’s best interests in mind, we can hope that the cybersecurity companies are able to outdo criminals when it comes to developing quality data and algorithms.
