IBM Looks To Watson To Fight Online Criminals And Filter The Flood Of Security Data

Worldwide spending on cybersecurity likely topped 75 billion last year, researchers at Gartner estimated, with companies more wary than ever of the risks posed by data breaches and other digital attacks. And along with rising costs, the sheer volume of digital security data has also increased dramatically: IBM estimated in a recent study that the average organization sees more than 200,000 pieces of security event data per day and that more than 10,000 security-related research papers are published every year. "Security researchers are getting hit with a firehose," says Caleb Barlow, vice president of IBM Security. "Once they get done with today, they've got another deluge of data coming tomorrow." To help companies handle that flood of data, IBM says it's training its Watson artificial intelligence platform--previously known for using its natural language processing power to beat humans on Jeopardy--to parse cybersecurity information, from automated network-level threat reports to blog posts from security professionals. "It's just gonna think just like a forensics investigator," says Barlow.