Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the Rescue of Cybersecurity

Is Cybersecurity a Major Concern?

According to a survey by CWC and the Ipsos Institute, only 29% of companies consider cybersecurity to be a priority,  and only one in two companies has implemented a strategy to combat cyber risks.

Over the past year, one in two companies has observed a 48% increase in the number of computer attacks. 

The symptoms are terrible because they can stop production, block the company's website, and cause a massive loss of turnover.

Most of the companies affected have been impacted on their business. Beyond these “classic” attacks, new scourges have appeared, with the “WannaCry” and “NotPetya” attacks which have highlighted the ransomware that has become the most frequent cyberattack.

An Update on New Threats

Attacks on businesses are changing from year to year; for example, physical attacks on banks are decreasing in favor of ransomware.

The precaution to take against ransomware is to make regular backups on a remote site. Another “trendy” threat is crypto mining or crypto jacking. This concept is that hackers do not steal data but CPU and Ram. 

The damage is, therefore, less substantial, but it nevertheless consumes electricity and bandwidth and causes machines to age prematurely in a situation of overheating. It can also impact the company's carbon footprint and business productivity. 

Other threats persist, such as so-called “APT” attacks; the objective of these attacks is to infiltrate the information system and exfiltrate data over time.

AI to Help

To deal with cyber criminals, the security market has made a big change by using machine learning and deep learning mechanisms. 

The goal is to break the classic model, which consists of creating a vaccine once a virus has been detected. Which generates each time a train of delay compared to the attacks.

The advantage of Artificial Intelligence is that you no longer need to know the threat to block it. This model is based on a statistical approach.

It will analyze up to a million characteristics of a file, its size, its code, its signature, and all these sequences of bits that are repeated; after that, a score will be assigned to it to know if a file can be executed or not. The system will then quarantine the faulty virus.

AI is a way to overcome the skills shortage in cybersecurity.  In any case, human beings are incapable of analyzing all the data stored in a supervision system. Artificial Intelligence can perform the first level of analysis and relieve operators who must read hundreds of lines of logs. While there, they will focus on the essential events, and the AI also provides decision support for confirmed experts.

Despite all the advantages of AI, we can still find flaws in this technology. Because for some experts, Artificial Intelligence could also paradoxically strengthen cybercrime because hackers also use complex algorithms to automate certain tasks. 

Making Artificial Intelligence Accessible

This third division is the most important for the future of the American firm. Indeed, the latter wishes to make Microsoft Cloud the reference platform of Artificial Intelligence for companies. 

The goal is to create powerful but easy-to-learn offers to make AI technologies accessible, both for software developers and for other businesses in the company.

It should, therefore, not be necessary to understand how intelligent computing systems work to benefit from them.

To do this, Microsoft is launching new products such as Windows ML, a tool that allows software publishers for Windows to integrate an image or video recognition layer and other automatic processing into their applications.

The American firm has also added new technological elements to improve the computer's understanding of language and make connected objects more intelligent.

Developing AI on EU Soil

Microsoft wants to deploy its artificial intelligence strategy to the main areas in which the company is established.

France, which represents the group's European headquarters, is one of the priority countries. The Redmond firm thus unveiled in the first quarter of 2018 an investment plan of 30 million dollars over three years to develop artificial intelligence in France.

The latter provides for launching a training hub for digital professions, which will notably give access to courses in AI offered by partner schools. 

A school for people remotes from employment wishing to join the sector has also been created. The first promotion will have 24 learners, but it could well welcome hundreds in the years to come.