NATO leaders are holding their annual summit as Ukraine looks to the security alliance for support in its attempt to push back invading Russian forces. The Vilnius communique, however, while emphasising NATO's support for Ukraine, gave no clear timetable on when the country might be able to join the alliance, in a major disappointment for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had travelled to the Lithuanian capital. "Ukraine's future is in NATO," the leaders said in the joint statement on Tuesday. "We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the alliance when allies agree and conditions are met," the declaration said, without specifying the conditions. The communique also touched on the Asia Pacific, with the leaders of Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea all attending as NATO allies. It said China was a challenge to NATO's interests, security and values with its "ambitions and coercive policies" triggering a furious response from Beijing. And it accused Beijing and Moscow of "mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order". China has said it wants peace in Ukraine, but has not condemned Russia's full scale invasion since it began in February 2022. NATO is a defensive Alliance. It is the unique, essential and indispensable transatlantic forum to consult, coordinate and act on all matters related to our individual and collective security. We reaffirm our iron-clad commitment to defend each other and every inch of Allied territory at all times, protect our one billion citizens, and safeguard our freedom and democracy, in accordance with Article 5 of the Washington Treaty. We will continue to ensure our collective defence from all threats, no matter where they stem from, based on a 360-degree approach, to fulfil NATO's three core tasks of deterrence and defence, crisis prevention and management, and cooperative security. We adhere to international law and to the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and are committed to upholding the rules-based international order. This Summit marks a milestone in strengthening our Alliance. We look forward to our valuable exchanges with the Heads of State and Government of Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and the Republic of Korea, as well as the President of the European Council and the President of the European Commission at this Summit. We also welcome the engagements with the Foreign Ministers of Georgia and the Republic of Moldova, and with the Deputy Foreign Minister of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as we continue to consult closely on the implementation of NATO's tailored support measures. This is an historic step for Finland and for NATO. For many years, we worked closely as partners; we now stand together as Allies. NATO membership makes Finland safer, and NATO stronger. Every nation has the right to choose its own security arrangements.

Helping companies make sense of their data. From real-time cybercrime mapping to penetration testing, machine learning has become a crucial part of cybersecurity. Fortunately, machine learning can help solve the most common tasks, including pattern detection, prediction, regression, and classification. In an era of large amounts of data and a shortage of network security talents, machine learning seems to be an alternative to solve many problems. Indeed, through machine learning, when applied to computer security, we can sort through millions of files to discover threats.

From insider threats to abuse of privileges and management to hackers, humans are important and diverse carriers of cyber risks. Therefore, Machine Learning help detect changes in the way users interact in the IT environment and describe their behavioral characteristics in the attack environment. Despite high marketing requirements, the reality is that the corporate security environment is a huge and dynamic network. And managers must constantly monitor, audit, and update based on continuous, unpredictable, internal, and external threat vectors. ML introduces various enhancements in the ability to detect, investigate, and respond to threats. But it is a combination of personnel and technology that can manage a full range of threats in the ever-evolving security environment.

Risk assessment is a major challenge for supply chain managers, as it potentially affects business factors such as service costs, supplier competition and customer expectations. The increasing interconnectivity between organisations has put into focus methods for supply chain cyber risk management. We introduce a general approach to support such activity taking into account various techniques of attacking an organisation and its suppliers, as well as the impacts of such attacks. Since data is lacking in many respects, we use structured expert judgment methods to facilitate its implementation. We couple a family of forecasting models to enrich risk monitoring. The approach may be used to set up risk alarms, negotiate service level agreements, rank suppliers and identify insurance needs, among other management possibilities.

Something is materially broken with web application security and, as a result, critical attacks are being missed. According to a new report from Kaspersky Lab, 73 percent of corporate network breaches in 2017 were achieved via vulnerable web applications. There are a variety of factors contributing to the problem: resource constraints, concerns over false positives and the sheer volume of the attack surface. The good news is that machine learning can be applied to help overcome these issues and strengthen application security. Most companies are failing to harness the full power of machine learning.

The primary thrust among global commentators last week was on dissecting and analysing the State of the Union address delivered by President Donald Trump. He tried to reach out to an American public exhausted by divisive politics and a waning faith in the American dream. The general sense was that it was a half-hearted call for unity. The focus of this column is on a global disruption in technology that is having a major impact on national and international security thinking, the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the 21st Century. America's competitive edge has been its unrivalled technological superiority that made it the 20th century powerhouse leading to an unprecedented industrial growth helmed by American innovation.

Hollywood images of artificial intelligence – and the iconic familiars of HAL 9000, the Terminator and Her's Samantha – have shaped the public perception of artificial intelligence (AI) as a vessel for human-like interaction. Yet with AI's resurgence applying the technology to all manner of business problems, security specialists are rapidly warming to its potential as a fastidious assistant that works tirelessly to pick eyedroppers of insight from raging rivers of information. This learning process has evolved from the refinement of big-data techniques feeding a surfeit of rich data sets to ever more sophisticated machine-learning solutions. Automated security systems now apply AI techniques to massive databases of security logs, building baseline behavioural models for different days and times of the week; if particular activity strays too far from this norm, it can be instantly flagged, investigated, and actioned in real time. As security practitioners are well aware, the flood of security alerts has become a logistical nightmare.

IBM has launched the Watson for Cyber Security beta program to encourage companies to include Watson in their current security environments. Starting off with such organizations as California Polytechnic State University, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and University of Rochester Medical Center, the program will grow over the next few weeks to encompass 40 companies spanning industries like banking, travel, energy, automotive, health care, insurance, and education. For the past few months, IBM Security has been working with eight universities -- California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, Penn State, MIT, New York University, University of Maryland at Baltimore County, and Canada's universities of New Brunswick, Ottawa, and Waterloo -- to help teach Watson the "language of cybersecurity." The research project involved feeding Watson's AI brain thousands of documents annotated to help the system understand what a threat is, what it does, and what indicators are related. Watson for Cyber Security combines machine learning and natural language processing to make associations in unstructured data like blogs, research reports, and documentation that security analysts can then use to make better, faster decisions.