AI Can Help Cybersecurity--If It Can Fight Through the Hype

Walking the enormous exhibition halls at the recent RSA security conference in San Francisco, you could have easily gotten the impression that digital defense was a solved problem. Amidst branded t-shirts and water bottles, each booth hawked software and hardware that promised impenetrable defenses and peace of mind. Artificial intelligence that, the sales pitch invariably goes, can instantly spot any malware on a network, guide incident response, and detect intrusions before they start. That rosy view of what AI can deliver isn't entirely wrong. But what next-generation techniques actually do is more muddled and incremental than marketers would want to admit.