Artificial Intelligence Vs. the Hackers

Last year, Microsoft Corp.'s Azure security team detected suspicious activity in the cloud computing usage of a large retailer: One of the company's administrators, who usually logs on from New York, was trying to gain entry from Romania. A hacker had broken in. Microsoft quickly alerted its customer, and the attack was foiled before the intruder got too far. Hackers are themselves famously adaptable, of course, so they too could harness machine learning to create fresh mischief and overwhelm the new defenses. For example, they could figure out how companies train their systems and use the data to evade or corrupt the algorithms.