The quick adoption of technology and the rising wave of the digital era have led businesses to grow exponentially and this is quite obvious! But we are also aware that technology is also becoming a threat to businesses and companies. With the rapid increase in cyber crimes and hacking cases, businesses need to redefine their strategy to reduce the cyber risk and learn to cope with them.

But are humans sufficient enough to cope with the rising cyber attacks? Well, the answer is no! Since each company differs in size and functions, it is becoming difficult for the human potential to analyse and improve the cybersecurity posture.

That’s where the role of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning comes in!

With Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, the technology and the software are able to detect complex problems, prevent phishing attacks, remove malicious links & malware and alert the organisation of the risks ahead. These potent tools are useful because they are able to learn the threats over time and identify the new types of attacks.

AI & Machine Learning work together without or less human assistance, thereby preferred heavily in the expeditiously emerging cybersecurity world.

AI exhibits the intelligence of humans in a more advanced way. AI is able to reason, organise and structure the data as humans do. Machine Learning manage large datasets and run through them without being explicitly programmed. It is a general conception that AI is a superset of Machine Learning.

RISING IMPORTANCE OF AI AND MACHINE LEARNING

Cybersecurity professionals often leverage AI and Machine Learning that has low fault tolerance and increased resource optimization to address the problem. Here are some points that shed light on the importance of AI and Machine Learning:

Enhance Human Analysis

These technologies help solve the problem of expensive expertise and cybersecurity products through resource optimization. It increases the staff productivity by reasoning, organising and structuring the large and complex data.

It subsequently reduces the false positivity rate and increases the accuracy to provide effective cybersecurity solutions. The widening cyber-attacks become a serious issue for the companies and the need to solve the problem faster and effectively is very necessary. AI and Machine Learning ensure the accuracy and speedy solution of the problem.

Fraud Detection

Early fraud detection can improve internal security and secure the operations of an organisation from any external cyber attack. ML reads the dataset patterns and AI applies the analytical model. Both these technology works together and detect any fraudulent transaction.

If Machine Learning is used correctly, these technologies help identify the fraud activities and also respond to the unknown fraud methods and techniques over time. Meanwhile, AI creates such models that reject the transaction if it is suspected of any fraud. With the help of the codes, AI flags the transactions and directs the investigator to speed up the investigation.

Incident Response

If the unfortunate situation arrives where the organisation is attacked by a cyber criminal, ML generates an automatic response in order to minimise the damage. Its defensive mechanism is able to stop attacks.

AI and Machine Learning are able to quickly respond to a situation which usually takes time when it is done by humans. It speeds up the process of early identification of the situation and conducts forensics to effectively defend the attacked network.

Bot Protection

Bots are a large section of online traffic. The bots can be of two types; good bots and bad bots. Bad bots can be a potential threat to company systems. Bots can perform various tasks such as search engine indexing, website monitoring and distributing denial of service attacks.

The use of AI and machine learning in cybersecurity equipment can help in determining known and unknown bots. AI can analyse the bot’s behaviour and apply the defence technique based on the type of bot.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TECHNOLOGY

Though the technology can be useful and helps prevent cyber attacks, there is always other side of the coin. On one side, companies are using AI and Machine Learning for effective cybersecurity while on the other side the same technology is being used by the criminal networks to automate the attacks.

Cybersecurity industry expert, Gaurav Batra who is the Founder & CEO of CyberFrat mentions that “AI and Machine Learning along with strengthening cybersecurity also helps the hackers to attack the organisations as well as individuals. Lots of data analytics also use AI and ML to temper the data.”

He further adds, “Hackers use malicious codes to keep a track of the activity of a target. And Instead of monitoring 24×7, they use AI engines that catch the pattern with set algorithms and keywords. This engine keeps a track of the target and as soon as the desired keyword matches the pattern, it tells the hackers the best time to attack.”

Here are a few ways, cybercriminals are using the technology to attack the businesses:

Data Poisoning

Attackers use AI and Machine Learning for data poisoning. Through data poisoning, attackers temper the data and insert incorrect and misguided information. They also temper the Machine Learning algorithms and models to create the faulty outputs.

Data Manipulation

Since the entire security network builds using the algorithms, these algorithms can be manipulated. Cybercriminals can manipulate and execute incorrect actions. From this method, hackers modify the document or critical data and alter the information instead of directly stealing the data.

Social Engineering Attacks

Experts believe that the biggest threat to the world by Cyber criminals will be in form of social engineering attacks. A Social Engineering attack refers to the attack that influences a person’s or society’s behaviour as a whole. It will become a bigger threat when the difference between technology and humans would be difficult to identify.

To sum it up all, Machine Learning and artificial intelligence can surely be the solution to cyber crimes. Cyber weapons should be more intelligent and advanced to defend against cyber crimes. We need to prevent such crimes by educating and spreading awareness among people.