Artificial intelligence (AI) benefits different industries today. How about the benefits of AI in cybersecurity?
AI in Cybersecurity
AI is a branch of computer science that aims to create intelligent machines that can think and learn. Also, AI is an interdisciplinary field addressing the problems of perception, reasoning, and decision-making.
As such, AI has big implications for cybersecurity. On one hand, AI can be used for malicious purposes such as cyberattacks and cybercrime. On the other hand, AI can be used to help defend against cyberattacks and cybercrime by developing automated security tools and automated incident response systems.
AI has already been applied to many security problems and can address many of today’s cybersecurity issues such as:
- Offensive: AI is useful in attacks on websites and computer networks by hackers.
- Defensive: AI is useful in defending against cyberattacks by hackers.
Benefits of AI in Cybersecurity
AI can process great volumes of data
With AI, it can process thousands of times more data than humans can process. So AI can process large amounts of data to perform real-time security analysis to improve the security of websites and computer networks.
AI uses machine learning
Besides, AI uses machine learning to learn from experience, identify patterns, and make decisions based on experience.
AI is scalable
Large volumes of data are not a problem for AI. It is scalable to handle vast amounts of data. As a result, AI can be useful to monitor and respond to cyberattacks in real-time.
AI is cost-effective
AI is cost-effective because it requires a smaller number of human operators for monitoring and responding to cyberattacks. In addition, a single AI-enabled system can protect a large number of users.
Real-time detection
AI can detect anomalies happening in real-time. It is not necessary for humans to continuously monitor the status of websites and computer networks; because the data from the AI system is analyzed by the machine learning algorithms which use anomaly detection.
AI can automate security tasks
It is necessary for humans to manually perform many security tasks such as vulnerability assessment, intrusion detection, malware, and intrusion response. AI can automate these tasks to improve the security of websites and computer networks.
When an anomaly occurs, it can send an alert to security operators about the anomaly which enables them to act immediately to fix it. AI can also monitor cyberattacks that are already taking place. It can monitor the activities of various users on websites and computer networks by performing real-time analysis on large volumes of data. If an attack is detected, it can automatically respond to the attack. For instance, by blocking malicious traffic and reporting attack trends.
AI does not suffer from human emotions; so it can always make rational decisions when responding to cyberattacks. For example, humans are angry when they are attacked but this emotion prevents them from making rational decisions while responding to attacks because they are blinded by their emotional reactions while under cyberattacks.
Instead, if a machine is attacked, there will be no emotions involved so it will be able to respond rationally while under cyberattacks, unlike humans under similar circumstances who will have their judgment clouded by emotion while responding to attacks.
