Security analysts investigate threats by finding patterns, forming hypotheses, reaching conclusions, and sharing their findings with the rest of the business. These are labor-intensive steps that take not only time, but years of training and expertise. And as operational technology (OT) becomes further integrated with the corporate network, and as threat-actors continue to advance their methods of attack, the emergence of a cyber security skills gap in the OT world becomes more and more evident. The trend towards interconnected IT and OT environments is matched in equal measure by converging security teams. CISOs have assumed responsibility for the security of ICS environments without necessarily possessing specialized OT skills.

With years of cybersecurity experience under his belt, security expert Mike Beck investigated whether he could teach AI to think like a cybersecurity analyst--and helped to transform the fight for online security in the process. Few people know what it's like to battle cyberattacks in a high-stakes environment better than Mike Beck. Without his expertise, London's biggest event in 2012 could have gone dark. Beck, a cybersecurity expert with a background in UK intelligence, joined the UK's MI5 domestic security service shortly before the 2012 Summer Games opened. When the UK government learned of a serious threat to the electricity infrastructure supporting the Games, they looked to one of their newest hires.

A new ground-breaking cybersecurity tool has been launched that thinks like a human but works at the speed of a computer. The machine learning AI device was developed and released by cyber defense company, Darktrace. It is revolutionary in digital defense because of the way that it has been trained to make human-like decisions at such high velocity. The quickness at which cybersecurity judgments are made has been cut by 92% with the new design. Whereas it normally takes a human around 30 minutes to an hour to explore a single suspicious security report.

The Darktrace Cyber AI Analyst is a new technology that emulates human thought processes to continuously investigate cyber threats at machine speed. With transformational implications for the security industry, early adopters of the Cyber AI Analyst reported a 92% reduction in the time required to investigate threats and provide conclusions to executives. This innovation is the culmination of over three years of research at the Darktrace R&D Centre in Cambridge, UK. Using various forms of machine learning, including unsupervised, supervised and deep learning, the technology learned human intuition and trade craft from more than 100 world-class cyber analysts across thousands of customer deployments. Mike Beck, global head of Threat Analysis at Darktrace, told Information Age: "This is the latest evolution of the Darktrace Cyber AI platform, which started with autonomous identification of threats in 2013 and moved to autonomously reacting to attacks in 2016. Today we are transforming the human factor in cyber security, with autonomous expert investigation."