7 Benefits of Using AI for Cybersecurity

The cyberattack space is massive and has continued to evolve rapidly. For that reason, cybersecurity has become an integral part of every business plan. With the increase in cybercrime, there’s no denying that organizations need more than just human intervention to mitigate risks.

Due to these challenges, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity are becoming the main focus of business technology. AI for cybersecurity can help teams eliminate data breaches and strengthen their security measures.

AI was designed to imitate human intelligence and automate tasks that require 24/7 monitoring and intervention from humans. If utilized well, it can analyze many events to detect various types of cyberthreats —from phishing attacks to malware, ransomware, and zero-day vulnerabilities. These technologies constantly learn using data from past cyberattacks to identify potential threats.

This article takes a look at the benefits of artificial intelligence in cybersecurity. 

Network Traffic Monitoring

An organization network runs many activities, and there’s an enormous amount of data exchange between businesses and their clients. This sensitive data needs adequate protection from hackers and other malicious access.

However, IT security personnel can’t analyze all of this traffic independently. AI for cybersecurity can help you identify threats disguised as normal traffic. Unlike humans, AI can process and analyze a large amount of data more thoroughly and in a shorter time. 

Threat Detection

With the pace at which cyber threats are evolving, it’s a fact that traditional rule-based security systems can’t keep up. This is where AI systems come in. AI technologies are equipped with advanced algorithms to detect malware activities, run pattern recognition, and identify anomaly behavior before compromising the system.

AI has superior predictive intelligence with natural language, image, and other digital data processing abilities that allows it to source data on its own through web scraping. This intelligence can provide security teams with knowledge about the latest attacks to create a better cybersecurity plan.

Vulnerability Management

Proper vulnerability management is the best way to secure an organization’s network. As mentioned earlier, lots of traffic runs through an organization’s network, and it becomes imperative to detect, identify, and prevent this traffic from malicious access.

Unlike human security personnel, AI can quickly learn network behavior to identify the weak point in the system so organizations can focus on ways to mitigate those risks. This can help enhance vulnerability management, and the organization can secure network systems in time. 

Risk Prediction

AI systems can help determine your IT asset inventory, a documented record of all tangible and intangible assets. Cybercriminals are always trying to target these assets. With the help of AI in cybersecurity, you can predict how and when a cyberattack will occur and plan accordingly to allocate resources to the most vulnerable areas.

Better Endpoint Protection

The number of gadgets we use at our workplace is increasing rapidly, and it’s becoming impossible for cybersecurity personnel to keep track. Artificial Intelligence has a vital role to play in securing devices. VPNs and antivirus solutions can protect your system from malware and ransomware based on known signatures. However, to safeguard your systems against new threats, you need to stay updated with signature definitions. 

This can pose a significant threat if your virus definition falls behind due to a failure to update failures. In such cases, signature-based protection may not be able to protect you from new malware threats. But, using AI for cybersecurity will help you create a baseline that defines the anomaly behavior for endpoint devices. 

AI flags any activities that deviate from this baseline and takes appropriate action. It can report unusual activities to the appropriate security personnel. So rather than waiting for signature updates as with antivirus solutions, AI takes a proactive prevention approach against threats. 

Duplicative Process Reduction

Cybercriminals constantly look for new ways to attack organizations and compromise their network resources. More often than not, we use the same basic security practices every day. Human security personnel can get bored or experience fatigue and miss a critical network update, exposing your network to threats. 

AI was developed to imitate the best of human qualities while eliminating shortcomings. This allows AI to take care of duplicative processes that could wear out your security personnel. It carries out regular security checks to identify and prevent cyberthreats.

Incident Response

When an attack happens, organizations must respond quickly to reduce the risks and damages. A manual incident response strategy slows down threat detection and the required response, which leaves customer data at risk. However, an AI automated response can monitor millions of security activities daily, understand threat patterns, and respond faster to critical events than cybersecurity personnel.

With AI automated incident response, you can prioritize incident response events and ensure that you have the required resources focused on high.

Is AI Always Effective in Cybersecurity?

The use of AI in cybersecurity is mostly effective. It can help analyze enormous amounts of data quickly to detect and prevent unauthorized access before cybercriminals can do any harm. Additionally, AI systems are always on guard, using predictive techniques to identify threats and prevent them from compromising your network.

However, there’s a debate in the field about how effective AI in cybersecurity is exactly. The problem here is that sometimes small but accurate data proves more efficient in practice (data-centric AI). You don’t always need massive volumes of information to create accurate models. To this: You don’t always need massive volumes of information to create accurate models for data enrichment.

According to American data scientist Andrew Ng, in some industries that don’t have the luxury of large data sets, it’s better to focus on “good data” instead of “big data.”

How do Bad Actors Leverage AI?

AI is a double-edged sword that enables malicious threats and also prevents cybercrimes. Malicious hackers can leverage AI tools to enhance the precision and effectiveness of their attacks. They can use AI to bypass detection by learning the most common detection rules. Fuzzing is one of the standard techniques cybercriminals use to expose weakness in software and exploit it.

The use of AI can improve the accuracy and precision of the attack, resulting in more devastating damages. Also, cybercriminals can use AI to enhance phishing attacks. When AI powers a phishing attack, cybercriminals can extract only the needed information, making malware challenging to detect by traditional security solutions. 

Final Thoughts

AI is fast evolving and becoming a must-have technology for all businesses that want to improve their cybersecurity plan. The cyberattack landscape is growing, and humans can’t successfully prevent enterprise-level attacks. In addition to that, cybercriminals are also adopting AI in their practices.

The use of AI in cybersecurity offers more insights and better threat identification that security personnel can use to reduce data breaches and strengthen their security plans. Now is the time to take a decisive step toward using AI for cybersecurity to enhance your IT infrastructure.