Artificial Intelligence in Cybersecurity| Curse OR Blessing?

There is a huge debate between the technologists’ all over the world regarding the ability of artificial intelligence to support the cybersecurity industry.

Undoubtedly, artificial intelligence is a double-edged sword. It is a curse as well as a blessing in some way or the other. According to New York Times report in May 2018, scientific scholars in the China and the USA effectively directed that artificial intelligence system produced by Apple, Amazon, and Google will perform things like dialing phones, and opening websites without the consent of the users.

On the one hand, AI saves lives through early diagnosis of cancer and heart diseases; on the other side, many AI companies are worried that attackers and hackers might use AI to launch more powerful attacks.

Computer security has become AI’s hot spot. Now, many organizations are spending money on ‘’machine learning’’ startups. The official cybersecurity organizations are managing artificial intelligence in the majority of their services and products. Some massive technological companies such as Google include AI to secure and protect their cloud computing data centers. Stakeholders who are looking for early signs that AI might disturb industries must remember that cybersecurity in indeed a top area to watch.

Either state-sponsored attackers, cybercriminals, or ideological hackers all of them can employ AI. The cybersecurity specialists trust that criminals can use AI to create mutating malware which changes its structure to prevent exposure.

Artificial intelligence is both a curse and a blessing. In this article, we will discuss the different points which make it clear that AI is both a curse and a blessing for the users. Moreover, we will also discuss predictions made by various researchers to show how AI will benefit and harm us in the future.

How is AI in cybersecurity a blessing?

All over the world, AI is growing across the industries. Using AI can give a supporting hand to various sectors, from healthcare to banking, by speeding up the rate of data processing and administrative work. AI can effectively work to treat patients and deal with customers.

According to Capgemini research, 83% of firms which are introducing AI have realized that technology is helping them to develop new roles within the firm, somewhat taking them away, with two out of three jobs being at a higher level. Furthermore, under three quarters thought that AI robots replace no jobs in their workstation.

Now, the cybersecurity industry better knows that security risks are increasing day by day. Thus, with AI startups, many companies’ intents to identify and block malicious activity on computer networks much better than current technologies can. AI software examines and filters through vast stores of computer network data to detect any cyber threat.

How AI in cybersecurity a curse?

Progressively, many organizations are depending on AI to boost their risk carriage. Artificial intelligence is precious in hunting threat and detection. However, it is not without any faults.

Foes are capable of manipulating the AI data and algorithms to a level from where the AI system is crushed. The malware can then quickly get through without being recognized. This puts the essential organization data, methods, and users at high risk.

This kind of evil interference with AI-based security systems has labeled as AML (adversarial machine learning). As a result, both dealers and the organization’s security teams require to be more careful regarding the monitoring of AI-based security systems. The reason behind it is to make sure that they are doing their job correctly against cyber-attacks.

Ai is a curse in a way that hackers can use artificial intelligence tools to wipe out social media from personal data. The hackers can easily modify emails during spear-phishing attacks to trick people into revealing their security details. They can also use AI to recognize vulnerability in different computer security products.

Future Predictions:

It is predicted that cybercriminals along with black hat hackers will develop malicious chatbots on various legal sites to socially engineer unknown targets into clicking malicious links, downloading files, and sharing confidential information.

The year 2019 will see an increased number of attacks linked with the use of artificial intelligence machine learning. The artificial intelligence will examine the available options for exploitation and will create strategies which will lead to a rise in the number of successful bouts.

Artificial intelligence will be capable of obtaining the gathered information from useful hacks and incorporate them into new attacks. All this evolution will possibly lead to attacks which are harder to combat.

• AI will be used in the formation of a malicious executable:

When artificial intelligence communicates with comprised computer systems and monitors that what and how malware is detected so, at that time it is capable of making new malware generations.

The Al controllers will allow malware build to alter its code. It will do so to avoid detection on the system, despite the security tool installed.

• AI will force more and more cyber-attacks:

It is correct to predict that AI hackers will have higher and faster penetration with more automation to allow hackers to achieve greater effectiveness in conducting cyber-attacks.

The cyber defense must look at AI for faster analytics required to find all malicious activities. With both ML and AI driven response, the security teams can power triage and ranking while decreasing the false positives by up to 91%.

The firms need to look for innovative solutions which allow them to stay ahead of the upcoming unknown threat.  They can’t upgrade what they have neither can depend on homespun and homegrown way outs: the need to find out automatic and out-of-the-box solutions centered on AI.

Actions which can be taken:

The cybersecurity dealers must take AI vulnerabilities into account when they are designing the classification and detection systems. However, the following are some actions everyone should take to increase their defense:

• Make sure to upgrade the software regularly.
• Start an active risk program which must include development and verification of analytics.
• You must keep a vigilant eye on all unknown high number of false positives and false negatives.
• Get involve in human analysts in acute decision-making rather than in performing low-level repetitive tasks.

Final Thoughts:

AI is both a curse and a blessing. It is also predicted that it will become more of evil in the upcoming time.

To combat the situation, AI must improve computer security tools. All this can be done by quickening up the incident responses whenever malicious software is detected on the computer networks.