Machines v. Hackers: Cybersecurity’s Artificial Intelligence Future

by  Paul F. Roberts,  The Christian Science Monitor

It’s a common refrain after any recent high-profile breach into federal computers and corporate networks: There aren’t enough skilled cybersecurity professionals to outwit criminal hackers.

That message from officials, executives, and industry experts isn’t just grousing, either. According to industry estimates, the US needs about 200,000 more workers to fill current cybersecurity roles. Globally, the gap is five times higher – an estimated 1 million workers.

But as businesses compete for scarce cybersecurity talent and policymakers weigh remedies for the digital security worker shortage, the ground underneath the profession is shifting.

Now, computers equipped with sophisticated learning algorithms are performing jobs that until recently required highly trained humans. Over time, experts say, the complexity of cybersecurity jobs performed by machines will increase, further reducing the demand for workers and changing the entire nature of cybersecurity work.

SparkCognition CEO Amir Husain notes artificial intelligence is already being employed to secure information with tasks such as file analysis, to determine whether a given file is malicious or not, based on patterns identified in previous malicious files.  Also,  computers are now a days capable of performing many of the response functions currently handled by people, only much faster.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) next month will host the first-ever hacking contest pitting automated supercomputers against each other. DARPA’s Mike Walker says the competition seeks to build impetus for the construction of “autonomous systems that can arrive at their own insights, do their own analysis, make their own risk equity decisions of when to patch and how to manage that process.”

Meanwhile, technology companies are working toward the same objective, with IBM in May announcing plans to teach a cloud-based version of its Watson cognitive technology to spot cyberattacks and computer crimes. Experts note much of cybersecurity work entails extracting insights from a vast corpus of unimportant data. “You’re looking around your infrastructure and studying [network traffic] for machines that are talking to some [Internet] address or region that your network hasn’t talked to before,” says the SANS Institute’s John Pescatore. Read the article.