Darktrace, a cybersecurity firm from Britain, has made an official statement that one of its customers successfully blocked the invasion of Babuk ransomware onto their network by using the company's Automated Response technology, titled Antigena. Antigena is a self learning tech-form that knows how to detect, respond and investigate cyber attacks. And as it is fairly backed by Artificial Intelligence (AI), it can also block emerging cyber threats in real-time. Ransomware threat has become a headache to most CIOs and CTOs of corporate companies. DarkTrace AI can detect any abnormalities in a network by scanning out performance issues and unusual connection requests and alert the admin about any possibilities of malware intrusion.

Yes, these are all super popular buzzwords, but they are also significant ideas with an incredible number of applications in many industries. Cybersecurity is just one area where AI and ML are solving many challenges, including worker shortages, increased attacks, and more malware detection than ever before. According to the AV-TEST Institute, over 600 million new malware files were created every month in 2017. How can humans possibly stay ahead of these threats? The idea that AI can do this job better and faster than humans is scary to many, but it does not need to be.

This past February marks the two-year anniversary when Livingston County, Michigan, was hit by ransomware. The wealthiest county in the state had three years' worth of tax information possibly at the mercy of cybercriminals. As a local government, county CIO Rich C. Malewicz said they have been a target of ransomware, but in this instance they had backups at the ready. He said the most memorable ransomware attack was a result of a watering hole campaign using malvertizing to infect users visiting a local news website. "This attack was very clever in that all you had to do to get infected was visit the website, you didn't even have to click on the page. Once the user went to the local news website, they were immediately redirected to a site hosting exploit code and the infamous page appeared demanding a ransom with instructions," he said.