This Cybersecurity Unicorn Aims to Reinvent Anti-Virus with AI

Anti-virus software has a hard time keeping up. Piles of new viruses come out each week, so cybersecurity unicorn Cylance is taking what it claims to be a completely new approach: artificial intelligence that learns to recognize malicious code based on an analysis of viruses from the past. It calls the new product CylancePROTECT. In an AMA on Reddit today, the company's head of reseach, Jon Miller, wrote: "Cylance was the first AI built to statically analyze and convict malware pre-execution. We definitely didn't invent AI, but we were the first to use it this way to deliver pre-execution protection. Many other products have been using machine learning, it's just that it was used to support legacy methodologies of protection/detection, using ML to identify trends so static signatures could be built, which in a world where attackers are creating individual pieces of malware to avoid signatures, results in a severe lack of efficacy, thats the problem Cylance was built to solve."