Integration of Human Intelligence and ML in Cybersecurity

Machine learning (ML) has helped to transform cybersecurity over the past decade. With its ability to observe, contextualise and draw conclusions from data, machine learning can perform many crucial security tasks with greater speed and accuracy. It has tempted some to suggest their ML-infused solutions make human intelligence unnecessary. Effective cybersecurity requires a balance of both human and machine.

ML in cybersecurity is an approach to artificial intelligence (AI) that uses a system capable of learning from experience. It tends to reduce efforts or time spent on both simple and difficult tasks like reinforcing cybersecurity. In short, ML is a system that can identify patterns by using examples instead of by programming them. With the help of ML, a system learns consistently, makes decisions based on data rather than algorithms, and change its behaviour.

ML in Cybersecurity

ML algorithms help organisations to identify malicious activity faster and prevent attacks before they get started. Start-ups like Darktrace have seen success around its ML-based enterprise Immune Solution since 2013. Darktrace even helped one casino from North America when its algorithms recognised a data exfiltration attack, which used a connected fish tank as the entry. The organisation claims that it prevented a similar attack during the Wannacry ransomware crisis in 2018.

Traditional Phishing detection methods provide less speed and accuracy to find all the malicious links reliably leaving users at risk. To address this problem, predictive URL classification models based on ML algorithms can find patterns to reveal a malicious sender's email. Those models are ready to spot scale behaviours such as e-mail headers, body data, designs etc. These models can be utilised to recognise if the email is malicious or not.

Webshell is a piece of code that is maliciously stacked into an online site to allow the cybercriminal to form alterations on the internet root catalogue of the server. This ensures that getting to the database of the framework entirely is picked up. If it is an eCommerce site, cyberattackers could be getting to the database on a visit premise to collect credit card data of the client base.

Targets of webshell-using attackers are continually backend eCommerce stages. The significant hazard of eCommerce stages is associated with online instalments that are predicted to be secure and secret.

Some believe that ML could help close vulnerabilities, particularly zero-day threats that target widely unsecured internet of things (IoT) devices. There is some proactive work in this area as well. Forbes reports that researchers at Arizona State University used ML to monitor traffic on the dark web to spot data related to zero-day exploits. Armed with this type of insight, companies could potentially close vulnerabilities and prevent patch exploits before they result in a data breach.

Integration of ML and Human Intelligence

Both ML and human intelligence play pivotal roles in a firm's desired security results. The rapid surge in security incidents coupled with the growing cybersecurity workforce gap makes ML essential for spotting at scale. It requires to be validated by human expertise for identification to be trusted and effective.

Few companies have security expertise and infrastructure to meet these standards on their own. Integration of human intelligence and ML in cybersecurity could manage detection. And the response provider could augment an organisation's security efforts with automated real-time incident identification and the human intervention to verify complex security events before determining an appropriate response. The addition of these abilities is one of the best ways to strengthen an organisation's security posture impacting the likelihood and minimising successful cyberattacks.