While technology is evolving, the demand for higher and stronger security levels is also increasing because more and more people are placing their information on the web. Some of the more popular and widely used mediums of information security are artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Artificial Intelligence, popularly known as AI, is one of the well-known information security applications which can be used in a lot of real world situations with the most common being cyber-attacks, security and crime prevention, and protection of information. We’ll talk about each of these real-world applications in length.
Cyber Attacks from Hackers or Code Error
No matter what software you use on your computer, it is definitely susceptible to coding errors which could lead to security problems as well. These coding errors can easily be spotted by hackers who can exploit the weaknesses and crash the system. According to Cyber Security Lab director Roman Yampolskiy, viruses are very intelligent these days which is why we need something as intelligent as AI to combat it. Bots, for instance, are very smart attacking programs that can automatically infiltrate databases systematically. This gave rise to the demand for better security. The great thing about AI is that it has machine learning abilities which means that it can learn to adapt to the cyber-attack and even learn how to counter it. This enables the security system to fight off attacks without the IT team having to configure any settings.
Not only will AI have the ability to adapt to attacks by machine learning, but it will also be able to predict attacks before they happen. One particular platform is known as AI2 which was created by MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). This effort was a combined effort of the MIT CSAIL and a machine learning company named PatternEx. Together, they created AI2, an artificial intelligence program that uses analytics and data supplied by expert analysts in order to predict cyber-attacks.
Another use of AI for predictive security is from company AT&T. AT&T has shared that they are making use of artificial intelligence to avoid any attacks on the system that may cause downtime or crash. Not only will this help them prevent attacks, but it will also help them with maintenance. AI security will be able to detect which parts of the system need maintenance or work so that the computer scientists may work on those parts before they escalate into something big.
Privacy Protection
The last real-world application of AI or machine learning is the protection of private information. Running a system that contains the information of a lot of people in a network is a big battleground for hackers. Hackers from all over the internet strive to steal information from these big systems with a lot of private information. Machine learning abilities of computers are able to block off certain attacks of information theft by adapting to the type of attack that is being done. This is done through algorithms used for investigating a target population. Algorithms are able to look for patterns of information theft attacks. From there, the computer will prepare beforehand to defend the system from the attack. The whole core of machine learning security systems is the ability to prepare for an attack in advance by allowing the system to learn and adapt to cyber-terrorist patterns.
Apple is one of the companies that’s implementing such methods for customer privacy protection. One of the rather new but popular approaches to continuously manipulate data but still keep it safe and anonymous is known as differential privacy. This approach lets data analysts have access to different types of data and insights from the database without having to identify anyone whose information is in the database. Typically, if an analyst needs to pull out insights and data, he or she has to also pull out information of each person in the database. With this approach, the people that are in the database will be kept anonymous even though the analyst pulls out data or information on them.
Although security has been advancing along with technology, so have the methods of cyber-attacks and hackers. This is why it is very important for security specialists to also think in advance as to how to defend against attacks that may happen tomorrow. AI and machine learning programs can do this by empowering and enabling the computer to have the ability to defend against perpetrators by itself.
