Machine learning offers hope in the fight against cybercrime

The UK government statistics for 2016 reported that 65% of large firms detected a breach in the previous year, a quarter of which occurred at least once a month. More worryingly, a report by Gartner shows that 80% of all security incidents go undetected by the breached organisations, so the rates of cyber attack are higher than we realise. The costs of cyber attack can be crippling, as highlighted by the media in their coverage of the various incidences that have rocked the IT security world in the past few months. Seemingly robust and industry-leading organisations such as Yahoo have suffered large-scale hacks, while attacks on financial institutions provide very real examples of what customers and businesses stand to lose by being the victim of a cyber attack. When Tesco Bank was hacked in 2016, £2.5 million was stolen from customer accounts, and the recent Lloyds Bank attack saw 20 million customer accounts compromised.