But rather than impeding the pace of innovation, these concerns are prompting many corporate security chiefs to accelerate the development of advanced capabilities, in a bid to turn the tables on attackers by better detecting the misuse of data and keeping it safe. "Artificial intelligence is a backbone of security initiatives," Camille François, chief innovation officer of social-media analytics firm Graphika Inc., said Tuesday at the WSJ Pro Cybersecurity Executive Forum in New York. Among other applications, AI is being used in cyberattack modeling, where smart tools identify security vulnerabilities in simulated breaches or hacks, Ms. François said. Separate subscription required for some articles. The strategy is to approach your own systems like a hacker, she added, allowing AI-powered apps to find areas that need stronger security features.

Fralick chairs McAfee's Analytic Center of Excellence and is responsible for the cybersecurity company's technical analytic strategy that integrates into McAfee consumer and enterprise products. Prior to Intel's divestiture of McAfee, she was Chief Data Scientist in Intel's Internet of Things Group where she developed machine learning and deep learning analytics for over eight different markets. And while broadly applying the term AI makes it easier to market and talk about, for Fralick who has 40 years expertise in the field, each type of model under the AI umbrella has different levels of complexity and intelligence behind them. "As a data scientist and an engineer, I look at AI to be very specific mathematically. I look at deep learning to be very different mathematically from machine learning."

Security firm McAfee has warned that it's more likely humans will use AI for malicious purposes rather than it going rogue itself. It's become a cliché metaphor, but people are still concerned a self-thinking killer AI like SkyNet from the film Terminator will be created. McAfee CTO Steve Grobman spoke at this year's RSA conference in San Francisco and warned the wrong humans in control of powerful AIs are his company's primary concern. To provide an example of how AIs could be used for good or bad purposes, Grobman handed over to McAfee Chief Data Scientist Dr Celeste Fralick. Fralick explained how McAfee has attempted to predict crime in San Francisco using historic data combined with a machine learning model.

You can no longer believe what you see. Deepfakes, which use artificial intelligence to make people appear to say and do things in videos that they haven't said or done, have been growing more realistic at an alarming rate. And it's a matter of time before they're used to try to circumvent cybersecurity. Steve Grobman, chief technology officer at cybersecurity firm McAfee, and Celeste Fralick, chief data scientist, warned in a keynote speech at the RSA security conference in San Francisco that the tech has reached the point where you can barely tell with the naked eye whether a video is fake or real. They showed a video where Fralick's words were coming out of a video of Grobman's face, even though Grobman never said those words.

That was among the takeaways from the Tuesday morning keynote sessions here at RSA 2019. "AI is the new foundation for our entire industry, it will enable us to better defend ourselves, to better detect threats, to out-innovate our adversaries, to solve other key issues," said Steve Grobman, CTO of McAfee. "But we have to ask, are we looking at AI objectively? We cannot only focus on the potential, we must also understand the limitations and how it will be used against us." Grobman continued with an example of work McAfee did in taking public safety data sets about crime and with 50 lines of python and machine learning to predict whether a crime would be committed in a specific region of the city based on certain parameters.

Disciplines such as artificial intelligence and machine learning are playing increasingly important role in cyber security, but not at the expense of human intellect. This is one of the key messages from the first day of McAfee MPOWER, the company's annual security conference in Las Vegas. Indeed, one of the company's two new product launches, Investigator, has this complementary approach of human and machine at its very heart. "I think cyber security is a fundamentally different field to many other areas where artificial intelligence, machine learning is being used, Grobman said. "The example I like to give is weather forecasting [because] as we get better at forecasting weather, the laws of physics don't get upset and decide to change the way water evaporates.