IBM's Watson Has a New Project: Fighting Cybercrime

IBM's Watson supercomputer hardly needs any more resumé-padding. It's already won Jeopardy, written a cookbook, and dabbled in revolutionizing healthcare. Today, IBM announced that Watson is taking its cognitive learning chops to the cloud, where it'll apply them to analyzing, identifying, and (hopefully) preventing cybersecurity threats. But first, it's going to have to learn. There are already plenty of computer-enhanced approaches to combating cybercrime, most of which involve identifying outliers or abnormalities--like when a user logs a few too many failed password attempts--and determining whether those constitute some sort of threat.