Application of AI to prevent, detect cyber threats

Amy O'Connor, chief information officer at Cloudera and Patrick Sullivan, global director of Security Strategy at Akamai, discuss the growing use of artificial intelligence in both public and private sector cyber security, The latest agency to consider using artificial intelligence to augment their cybersecurity systems is the Internal Revenue Service. A request for proposals went out in June for an analytics platform to identify risks at the agency, and AI cloud providers are jumping at the opportunity. "I think it's encouraging that the IRS is going down this path. We see both in the private sector and public sector that people are turning to machine learning. One of the challenges that we face is not only are the threats growing… but just the challenge of finding qualified security professionals is daunting. There's estimates from ISACA that we will be about two million security personnel short next year and that grows to three and a half million based on estimates a couple of years from there," said Patrick Sullivan, global director of Security Strategy at Akamai "So what you end up with is a lot of great security tools that there's no human there that is trained to consume those, to inspect those. That's one opportunity with machine learning is to have better inspection of that enormous security perimeter that you have there."