Adopting artificial Intelligence and automated Cyber Activities
January 12, 2023
Computer devices are essential to the daily activities of our personal and business lives. From the birth of the first digital computers in the early ’60s organisations were able to use these machines without any know cyber threats, however, since the dawn of modern computing cyber threats have been one of the major threats that persist in hindering ‘regular-workflow’ on personal and organisational devices and networks. As an alarm to combat such threats, solutions have been implemented to protect assets from being victims of these threats.
However, shortcomings exist on those solutions that have been implemented to counteract with threats, given the fact that the architecture of the solutions/ techniques is designed on a static architecture comprising of fixed algorithms. Furthermore, addressing every kind of threat certainly using the same manner and approach despite how unique the attack or threat might be proved to be insufficient in past cases. This is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) Techniques and Automated Cyber activities prove to be the preferable solution.
Limitations to Non-AI Techniques and Unautomated Cyber Activities
There are more limitations to this approach including slow throughput and the lack of scalability and resilience but in this post, I will only explain two.
Low detection rate: Traditional cyber security tools use a method whereby security specialists define patterns of normal network and/or system behavior based on what they know or what they have experienced, however, in reality that’s not how it works, threats are ever evolving and cyber criminals are always coming up with new and unknown malicious threats and the system will fail to detect an attack before and when it happens.
Lack of automation: Human supervision is needed to keep the traditional system in an optimum state as they are not able to adapt automatically to changes in their environment due to the fact that it is constantly updated with log data. Consequently, causing delays as well as an overhead in costs and resources.
Benefits of Adopting Artificial Intelligence Techniques and Automated Cyber Activities
1. Detects Breaches Beforehand
The majority of attacks follow an order of precedence before launching the actual attack know as a cyber kill chain, the framework assumes that every attack sequence starts with a reconnaissance phase, in which an attacker tries to locate gaps and vulnerabilities of their prey/target system, which majority of organizations and personal networks have poorly constructed networks with incompetent defense structures in place, hence detecting a vulnerability would be the easiest part of the process.
Once the first phase is dealt with, the attacker continues on to weaponize and deliver the malware which could be in the form of ransomware then followed by exploitation phase. So, the solution that (AI) Techniques and Automated Cyber activities offer to solve the problem is generating early warnings before the attack takes place.
2. Contemporary Approach
We live in a fast-evolving world, everything is changing rapidly every day. Hence, cyber and virtual space are also going through fast paced evolutions which cyber criminals are always there to capitalize on the opportunity. So, the solution that AI techniques and auto cyber activities proposes regarding the fact is to provide a service that will study and analyze new threat types and the actors (cyber criminals) that are involved in these activities.
3. Counteracting Threats
AI uses an intelligent approach to handle tasks by prioritizing the use of the best probable solution. So what the system will do in an event of an attack is that is will analyze the information which in this case will the type of attack and its characteristics. Once established, the system will suggest counteraction to be taken, this is if it’s not set to automatically counteract.
The bottom line
Traditional methods still offer a reasonable layer of protection on mission-critical assets of organizations, which basically their downtime is something that can’t be allowed to take place, however, flaws exists in this approach and that is where AI and automation takes over to ensure there is absolute none to minimal downtime for crucial business assets.
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