Will AI Help or Hurt Cybersecurity? Definitely!

what are two of the hottest topics not only in I.T but in society these days well if you said artificial intelligence and cyber security I'd agree with you both are really hot in fact even your non-technical friends have heard of these and may be talking about them and asking you questions and I'm going to suggest to you this intersection between the two even hotter still so what are we going to talk about in this video I'm going to talk about what from a cyber security standpoint AI can do to you and what it can do for you so let's take a look at that I'm going to start with some of the downsides first and then we'll conclude with some positive things on the downside what could AI do to us from a cyber security standpoint well it turns out that a lot of times we're able to tell about a phishing attack because the English language of the rider is not so good it's not their first language however you could now go into a chat bot and use it to generate very natural sounding language even though you might say but but Jeff there are Protections in some of these chat Bots that if you tell it to write you a phishing email it won't do to it there are also ways of re-engineering your prompt so that you can get past that so this is one area where phishing attacks are going to get better and the ways that we've been able to detect them in the past are not going to be so effective anymore what's another thing well on the positive side this generative Ai and chat Bots and things like that are able to write code for us so if I want to I can have it write code and do it really quickly and effectively it also means it could write malware as well it also means it could insert malware into the code that I have it also means it could insert back doors into the code that I have so we got we have got to also verify when we ask it to write code for us then in fact the code that it's giving us is pure and is doing what we intend for it to do another thing it could do to us misinformation how does this happen well these are generative AIS so one of the things that they suffer from is this issue we call hallucination where it may make up information or conflate two things that are not really related to each other and give a false impression also we could have a determined attacker who is doing what's known as a prompt injection where they're inserting bad information into the system or they're attacking the Corpus that is the body of knowledge that the system is based on and if they were able to do that then what comes out would be wrong information so we have to be careful to guard against over-reliance and make sure that we're verifying and testing our sources so that we can make sure that they're trustworthy one other example I'll give you here and there are actually many but I think this one's particularly interesting is this idea of a deep fake a deep fake is where we basically have an AI system that is able to copy your image and likeness your mannerisms your voice your appearance all of these things to the point where someone is looking at a video of you and they can't tell if it really was an actual video of you or a deep fake where we could have you saying things that weren't true and therefore if we're going to trust this kind of system we need a way to verify these things but right now the Deep fake technology has gone so far ahead in a very short period of time that it's going to be hard to verify those kinds of things okay we've just talked about what AI can do to us now let's look at some positives what can AI do for us in the cyber security space it turns out a lot in fact we do a survey each year that we call the cost of a data breach survey and the report that came back this year indicated that the number one thing you can do to save on the cost of a data breach and improve your response time is the extensive use of AI and Automation and here's what it can do on the one hand it can save on average 176 million dollars per data breach with the average data breach costing four and a half million that's a significant savings it can also cut down the mean time to identify and contain a breach by a hundred and eight days that makes a big difference so we know this is effective now what are we doing to make these kinds of results well it turns out a lot of what we do in this space is to do better analysis we're going to analyze large data sets lots of information that we have out there it's very hard to find patterns if I give you a whole large data set but if I use a technology called machine learning I can do a lot better job of spotting outliers and anomalies which is what we want to do in security a lot now I mentioned machine learning what is that well if you think about AI in particular as this large sort of umbrella term with a number of Technologies involved well Machine learning is a subset of that that specifically deals with some of these kind of analyzes that I've just referred to machine learning is what is often used in the security space we do it a lot because again it's very good at spotting anomalies and outliers and patterns and that's what we need a lot of in the security space so we're doing a lot of this today and a lot of these results come from leveraging machine learning which is a subfield of AI what else I mentioned automation well AI can help us in the automation task as well and I'll give you a few examples coming up but some of the things it can do is anticipate what we need to do next and some of those kind of things really start coming in from the area of deep learning which is a subfield of machine learning and then now this really new area that everyone is talking about these days Foundation models or you may hear them called large language models generative AI chat Bots they all exist in this space down here what can we start doing as I said security has mostly leveraged this in the past what can we start doing to leverage some of this stuff going forward well it turns out a lot of things because one of the things that Foundation models are really good at is summarizing they can be fed a lot of information and then it can give you a very quick summary of that why would that be useful well if you've got tons of documents you're trying to review it could give you the net the cliff notes of that another good use case for this would be incident summarization and case summarization if I'm seeing lots and lots of cases in my environment this kind of Technology could be used to tell me what are the trends among those cases are these things all related or are they all very different and my guess is they're probably at least a few things that are similar about these so that's an another nice use case that we'll see coming in the future from generative AI Foundation models into cyber security some other things we can do we know these kind of chat Bots are good at interacting so you can respond to them in natural language you don't have to format your queries using a particular query language or using a particular syntax you use the natural language that you're used to so for me I would state in English what are we being affected by this particular kind of malware and maybe what it could do is build a query for me that I can then run into my environment and it comes back and tells me am I affected or not and I can then ask more questions tell me more about this kind of malware what kind of indicators of compromise are there that are associated with this all of that stuff gives me a very easy intuitive way to get information that is highly technical out of the system and do this much faster another thing we might want to do is generate playbooks playbooks are the things that we use in incident response when we're trying to figure out what do we need to do once we've had an incident so generating these on the Fly generative AI generating playbooks you can see where there might be some type of crossover this is a good use case also for this technology so expect to see more of that and in fact there could be other types of things where we're using generative creative technology because these things really are creating for instance with threat hunting a threat Hunter is basically coming up with a hypothesis and saying I wonder if someone were to attack us maybe they would do the following things and we have a limitation in terms of our imagination sometimes the bad guys may dream up scenarios that we don't so it might be useful to have a system that can dream up scenarios we didn't think of using a generative AI to generate hypothetical cases that we then go out and automate and do a threat hunt in our environment this is all really super exciting stuff I think and it shows exactly what we'll be able to do in this space because what we want to be able to do is move away from being purely reactive to a more proactive way of doing cyber security and that's the good news in this story we've got Ai and cyber security and if they're working together as you see here we can end up with a more proactive Solution that's more cost effective and keeps us all much safer thanks for watching if you found this video interesting and would like to learn more about cyber security please remember to hit like And subscribe to this channel

Channel: IBM Technology

Views: 27,091

Keywords: IBM, IBM Cloud, AI, CYBERSECURITY

Id: cjy5jpRS_S0

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 09 2023