Cities and Counties Turn to Machine Learning to Bolster Cybersecurity

In late 2017, a government employee in Livingston County, Mich., plugged a personal laptop into the workplace server -- inadvertently exposing the network to malware. "We had 9,000 attacks within a few minutes from this computer," says Rich Malewicz, CIO and security officer for Livingston County. The county detected the attack and stopped it quickly using a program called Darktrace, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to provide real-time alerts about abnormal activity on the network. "No device on the network detected [the attack] except for Darktrace," he says. More local and state governments are eyeing AI and machine learning as tools to help combat cyberattacks, in part because hackers themselves have adopted the technology.