Building Resilience: AI in Cybersecurity

AI in cybersecurity is quickly becoming one of the most common catchphrases in modern cybersecurity, which is unsurprising given how AI is being integrated across a wide range of applications. This "buzzphrase" is not mere hype, though, as evidenced by the rise of a new industry sub-segment: AI in cybersecurity.

Markets and Markets reports that AI in cybersecurity is set to grow to a $60.6 billion market by 2028 at a compounded annual growth rate of 21.9 percent (forecast period: 2023-2028). The estimated value of this market in 2023 is around $22.4 billion.

AI has been a game changer in several fields, and its contribution to cybersecurity is undoubtedly going to be similar. With cyber threats becoming increasingly aggressive, pervasive, and more sophisticated, there is no reason not to integrate AI into cyber defense. Not to forget, AI is already being used by threat actors.

Below are some of the crucial benefits artificial intelligence is bringing to cybersecurity. From automation to advanced threat hunting, AI is augmenting cybersecurity in many ways.

Going toe-to-toe against AI-toting cybercriminals

There is no reason to allow cyber criminals to monopolize AI technology. The best way to address the artificial intelligence advantage among threat actors is to similarly use AI. It can serve as an adversary to an adversary. For example, since AI is being used to automate the process of finding vulnerabilities, organizations can also use AI to automatically and continuously hunt for vulnerabilities so they can be rectified before cybercriminals find and exploit them.

Cybercriminals are also leveraging AI to evade detection, allowing them to develop attack methods that are less likely to be identified and blocked by security controls. For this, cybersecurity teams can integrate AI in cybersecurity to enhance their traditional security posture so it does not only rely on threat signatures but also analyze user and entity behaviors to detect potential anomalies.

Also, artificial intelligence helps threat actors with their social engineering attacks. It enhances attacks that are aimed at exploiting human negligence, carelessness, inconsistencies, and poor attention to detail. AI can analyze systems and end users to find opportunities for social engineering attacks and rapidly craft personalized emails or other forms of content to be sent to prospective victims.

It might sound too complex to counter this attack, but AI can help analyze security weaknesses and anticipate possible assaults. Additionally, organizations can deploy AI chatbots to assist everyone in an organization in making sure that their actions do not entail security risks or lead to the creation of new, unknown attack surfaces.

The ultimate force multiplier

The cybersecurity industry continues to suffer from a skills shortage. Unfortunately, this problem is unlikely to be resolved very soon. Security teams face the persistent problem of having too few skilled security professionals, which is worsened by the ongoing global economic turmoil. There are fewer resources to allocate for cybersecurity and too few competent security professionals to hire.

Artificial intelligence offers a highly viable solution for this, as it can serve as a powerful force multiplier. Through AI, various repetitive tasks can be automated to free up human resources and assign them to more complex tasks. AI can process massive amounts of data, quickly recognize trends and patterns, oversee alerts, continuously conduct security validation procedures, and perform various other tasks that used to require human involvement.

AI can also do an excellent job of sorting and prioritizing security alerts. Often, organizations are overrun by a deluge of security notifications and incident data. Since most companies use multiple security tools from various vendors, they have to deal with disjointed security solutions that continuously generate huge amounts of data. This stream of data is quite challenging to oversee and prioritize. As such, it is not uncommon for urgent security alerts to be buried underneath numerous new alerts, which results in the failure to appropriately respond to such alerts promptly.

AI can be used to orchestrate security functions and incident responses, making it unnecessary to hire more security personnel for basic incident management, including mitigation and remediation. This is an efficient way to handle incidents and it is also generally more consistent and can run uninterruptedly.

AI makes threat detection easier and faster. Through machine learning and advanced analytics, organizations can competently perform endpoint, network, and cloud security functions without requiring more security analysts. Organizations can easily scale up their security operations with minimal labor costs or, in some cases, without additional costs at all.

Predictive analysis and advanced threat hunting

AI-powered cybersecurity veers away from the reactive nature of traditional cyber defense. It enables proactive protection against threats through predictive analytics. It can collect, process, and analyze tremendous amounts of security data to forecast possible security issues, weaknesses, and potential attack surfaces. Through advanced analytics, organizations can anticipate threats and be prepared to contain them as they arise.

Moreover, AI enables advanced threat hunting, which means upgrading existing threat detection capabilities to detect hidden vulnerabilities and concealed attacks. This is made possible by automating data collection and integration, rapidly running pattern recognition and anomaly detection mechanisms, benchmarking safe or normal behavior to easily spot anomalies, undertaking contextual analysis, and performing threat correlation.

AI can also adapt to the changing threat landscape to ensure that novel and more sophisticated attacks do not evade detection. It can also generate actionable insights to help human security analysts deal with threats more efficiently.

Rapid incident response

AI-aided cybersecurity means faster, more comprehensive, and more reliable threat detection. This also means that cybersecurity teams can address threats more promptly, preventing aggravation and the possibility of lateral movement attacks. In case an attack manages to pass through security controls, AI's ability to orchestrate responses can also slow down the impact of an attack, facilitating isolation mechanisms to prevent the problem from spreading to other devices, systems, or networks.

Time is of the essence when it comes to cybersecurity. A few minutes, hours, or days can spell the difference between a failed or a successful cyber attack. A data breach, for example, may take days to be discovered by most organizations, based on data from Verizon. For some, it can take months. With AI, organizations can considerably improve detection times, which means faster mitigation, containment, remediation, or prevention.

Significantly improved cyber resilience

Ultimately, artificial intelligence fortifies cyber resilience. It serves as an enabler of proactive, adaptive, and scalable security operations. AI makes threat detection faster and more accurate, which allows organizations to respond more quickly and avoid the worst consequences.

However, it is important to remember that AI should be treated as a tool, not a replacement for cybersecurity with human oversight and control. It is still unable to completely address cyber threats on its own, and it is unlikely to reach such autonomy. After all, AI is also used by threat actors, which means humans have a vital role to play in improving AI as a defensive tool or as an adversarial instrument.