Defense Department Sees Big Role For Artificial Intelligence in Cybersecurity – MeriTalk

The Defense Department is likely within 18 months of introducing autonomous cybersecurity tools that will be capable of augmenting human analysts by predicting threats, including insider activity, and dynamically isolating parts of the network that may come under attack, the department's outgoing chief information officer said Thursday. Terry Halvorsen, speaking to reporters during his last media roundtable before retiring at the end of the month, said as the department continues deployment of its 12 Joint Regional Security Stacks--a $1.6 billion effort to eliminate hundreds of disparate firewalls with centrally managed commercial security appliances and network monitoring tools--the next major step will be the deployment and testing of AI-based security applications. "Given the volume [of attacks] and where I see the threat moving it will be impossible for humans by themselves to keep pace. We can and we're very close to being able to put more autonomy into the security tools, and we will get to the point within the next 18 months where AI is becoming a key factor in augmenting the human analyst in making those decisions about what to do," Halvorsen said. Halvorsen recently hosted a special meeting of the Five Eyes alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States), plus Germany, Japan, and NATO, at which AI-based cybersecurity was discussed in detail. "This is very real inside the department.