IBM Turns Watson Into A Cyber Security Weapon Amid White House Interest

Security analysts at IBM X-Force Command Centers are now using Watson. IBM keeps doubling down on Watson, the company's heavily-marketed cognitive software that has won Jeopardy! Watson for Cyber Security, announced by IBM on Monday, takes the same core capabilities of Watson--the ability to read millions of documents and terabytes of information to derive insights a human might not spot--and puts them into a security operations center. With security officers at large corporations sometimes scanning several hundreds of thousands of events happening over their networks each day, IBM says it can add another line of defense by proactively helping to spot breaches and hacking attempts that might slip through unnoticed, then making suggestions on the best response. "This is breaking new ground," says Mark van Zadelhoff, general manager of IBM Security.