Before the introduction of AI, anti-virus programs needed to be updated in order to provide suitable levels of protection. Plus, they were always only searching for viruses that had already been identified by cyber defence software manufacturers. Virus protection was afforded thanks to a virus database and as soon as a signature was identified, it was treated and removed in a targeted manner. This is the principle of static signature recognition—a process in which AI was already present.
As time has gone on, however, cyber threats have become more sophisticated and intelligent and frequently change their method of attack. Anti-virus programs have trouble sniffing out viruses that are more difficult to identify and develop more quickly than the solution needed to counteract them.
The ace in the pack – Big data
When it comes to cybersecurity, AI plugs the gap left by this limited response. It’s a simple principle—uninterrupted and continuous learning. In other words, machine learning.
In the age of big data, the hundreds (of thousands) of pieces of data available provide a wealth of information that is absolutely useless if it is not used 100%. And this is where artificial intelligence comes into play. By leveraging this data, the solution can optimise its performance and detect viruses that aren’t necessarily listed in anti-virus databases. On the basis of the analysis of this huge volume of data, virus protection can quickly make strategic decisions.
Starting with unstructured data, AI can generate data groups and trends that at first appear to have nothing in common, but may indicate threatening behaviour. These methods, these behaviour analyses, have experienced a real boom thanks to machine learning.
Time of day, user, connection location, activity peak—these are pieces of data that are all different, but can be linked to each other with AI to show the presence of an as-yet unidentified virus.
Cybersecurity solutions are efficient and proactive as they provide an arsenal of AI and are therefore the perfect solution for the CIO. Response, autonomy, performance. The main benefit is that it helps employees, who are not able to process that much data, do their work especially in companies that have limited resources in terms of time, money or personnel.
