Machine Learning And AIs Could Herald The Future Of Cyber Security

It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the technology world that the rate of cyber attacks, the development of malware, and the exploitation of zero-day flaws makes is very difficult for IT teams and security specialists to keep up with let alone get ahead of cyber threats. Research from Symantec noted that nearly one million new malware threats emerge daily, and while there are many tools to make detecting rogue code an easier process, dealing with such an enormous amount of new threats appears to be an almost insurmountable task even for the best security teams and anti-virus systems. The answer to this, and the potential future of cyber security, looks to be the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to apply clever computers and smart software to a problem that leaves humans on the back foot in the fight against hackers. Rather than sift through data harvested from across IT networks, machine learning algorithms can be trained to detect certain malware and threat signatures and proactively sniff out threats, bypassing the need for cyber security experts to disappear into a warren of file paths and scripts to find tell-tale signs of malware. Webroot is one such cyber security company applying machine learning techniques to power its threat intelligence service without requiring resource sapping and time-consuming manual processes.