IBM's Watson for Cyber Security puts a new face on machine learning

IBM Watson may be able to win Jeopardy!, but security experts are skeptical about the technology's ability to defeat today's cyberthreats. The IBM Watson for Cyber Security beta program launched this week with 40 partners around the world in an effort to help security analysts make better, faster decisions from vast amounts of data, but experts said this is the same promise offered by many other products. IBM said Watson for Cyber Security will feature natural language processing that can help it to "understand the unique language of security." "The truth is, a lot of security vendors today are attaching [artificial intelligence] or cognitive to a number of products that are really just advanced analytics or machine learning, which are also important elements that can help in the fight against cybercrime," Diana Kelley, executive security adviser for IBM Security, told SearchSecurity. "What Watson will bring to the equation that is unique is the ability to digest vast amounts of both structured data, as well as all of the intelligence that exists in natural language, like blogs, white papers and research reports. For example, there are around 10,000 security research papers published each year, and 60,000 security blog posts published every month."