A quick guide to machine learning in cybersecurity

You may have seen the words'artificial intelligence' and'machine learning' widely used in the technology industry at the moment, and their appearances are no less prominent in cybersecurity. ABI Research predicts that machine learning in cybersecurity will help boost intelligence, analytics, and big data spending to US$96 billion by 2021. "We are in the midst of an artificial intelligence (AI) security revolution," says ABI Research analyst Dimitrios Pavlakis. "This will drive machine learning solutions to soon emerge as the new norm beyond security information and event management (SIEM) and ultimately displace a large portion of traditional AV, heuristics, and signature-based systems within the next five years." Beyond the numbers and the terminology, there is a simple question: What does machine learning do for cybersecurity, anyway?