Cisco: 32% of businesses are 'highly reliant' on AI for cybersecurity

With malware growing increasingly sophisticated, CISOs are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to combat cyberthreats and protect their companies' assets, according to a Wednesday security report from Cisco. Some 39% of CISOs said their organizations are reliant on automation for cybersecurity, the report found. Another 34% said they are reliant on machine learning, and 32% said they are highly reliant on AI. Encryption, while meant to improve security, is also causing challenges and confusion for cyber defenders, the report found. As of October 2017, 50% of global web traffic--both legitimate and malicious--was encrypted. This makes it more difficult to identify and monitor potential threats, because encryption offers malicious actors a tool to conceal command-and-control activity, giving them more time to operate and wreak havoc.