How to use machine learning and AI in cyber security

Cyber criminals are constantly seeking new ways to perpetrate a breach but thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) and its subset machine learning, it's becoming possible to fight off these attacks automatically. The secret is in machine learning's ability to monitor network traffic and learn what's normal within a system, using this information to flag up any suspicious activity. As the technology's name suggests, it's able to use the vast amounts of security data collected by businesses every day to become more effective over time. At the moment, when the machine spots an anomaly, it sends an alert to a human – usually a security analyst – to decide if an action needs to be taken. But some machine learning systems are already able to respond themselves, by restricting access for certain users, for example.