A.I. for Cybersecurity Is a Hot New Thing — and a Dangerous Gamble
Machine learning and artificial intelligence can help guard against cyberattacks, but hackers can foil security algorithms by targeting the data they train on and the warning flags they look for
By Martin Giles
When I walked around the exhibition floor at this week’s massive Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, I was struck by the number of companies boasting about how they are using machine learning and artificial intelligence to help make the world a safer place.
But some experts worry vendors aren’t paying enough attention to the risks associated with relying heavily on these technologies. “What’s happening is a little concerning, and in some cases even dangerous,” warns Raffael Marty of security firm Forcepoint.
The security industry’s hunger for algorithms is understandable. It’s facing a tsunami of cyberattacks just as the number of devices being hooked up to the internet is exploding. At the same time, there’s a massive shortage of skilled cyber workers (see “Cybersecurity’s insidious new threat: workforce stress”).
