There’s a lot of hype around artificial intelligence as the greatest thing since sliced bread, but will AI really help with cybersecurity? Criminals who run cybercriminal businesses also are capable of using the AI to commit crimes. It’s logical that if one person is smart enough to develop cyberprotection technologies that utilize AI, then thoughtful, creative criminals can use AI to penetrate those AI-created protections.
AI has been around since about 1959. It has had its ups and downs until 2011, when IBM’s Watson became a television celebrity by beating Jeopardy!‘s reigning champs.
Now IBM regularly has television commercials promoting Watson for myriad uses, including detecting problems with aircraft and elevators. At the same time, these ads make AI appear commonplace and part of our current culture, rather than as some esoteric complex computer technology.
AI in Cybersecurity
It is important to understand what machine learning is and how it relates to AI. To oversimplify, machine learning is a computer’s ability to recognize things. Artificial intelligence is a computer’s ability to mimic human understanding.
However with all the marketing hype found on the Internet, it is oftentimes difficult to understand when someone really is referring to AI or machine learning.
“I actually don’t think a lot of these companies are using artificial intelligence,” Malwarebytes CEO Marcin Kleczynski told Wired. “It’s really training machine learning. It’s misleading in some ways to call it AI, and it confuses the hell out of customers.”
Malwarebytes is a provider of machine learning threat detection software.
Machine learning can be very beneficial in the deployment of cybersecurity detection systems, as it enables devices to learn what to watch for.
