MIT Develops AI That Detects 85 Percent of Cyber-Attacks

MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), together with researchers from security firm PatternEx, has revealed a new AI (Artificial Intelligence) system called AI2, which can detect 85 percent of cyber-attacks, with false positives rates five times smaller than existing solutions. The new system doesn't rely entirely on artificial intelligence (AI), but also on user input, something that researchers call analyst intuition (AI), hence its name of AI2. Researchers said they fed AI2 with over 3.6 billion lines of log files, allowing the system to scan the content with unsupervised machine-learning techniques. At the end of each day, the system presents its findings to a human operator, who then confirms or dismisses security alerts. This human feedback is then incorporated into AI2's learning system and used the next day for analyzing new logs. After their tests had concluded, MIT and PatternEx researchers said AI2 achieved an 85 percent accuracy rate in detecting cyber-attacks, which is 2.92 times better than similar automated cyber-attack detection systems used today.