Enterprises establish stringent security operations to respond to rising cases of cyber-attacks. Security threats, risks, and attackers are, however, increasing their damage potentials and in sophistication. As such, it is essential to enhance incident detection capabilities and response measures. Traditional operations inhibit organizations from achieving this due to factors like skill shortages and inadequate personnel, and reliance on manual processes that are no match to the highly advanced cyber threat actors.
Augmenting security operations means enhancing and strengthening their capabilities. Artificial intelligence technologies have been revolutionary in the cybersecurity industry and have been extensively applied in developing security products and processes. In fact, they have been used to address the talent and skill shortages, ineffective manual processes, and the insufficient traditional approaches that hamper incident detection and response. Here’s how:
- Blending data science and human expertise: This leverage machine learning tactics in detecting, reporting, and triaging security threats, effectively augmenting key functions associated with Tier-1 analysts.
- Automated detection: AI-enabled tools and products are designed to continuously collect and deeply analyze network traffic in real-time. Analyzing such data sources exposes suspicious behaviors and actions associated with attackers, thus revealing any hidden threats. The faster they are discovered, the sooner they can be mitigated, thus preventing attacks.
- Enhanced network visibility and coverage: Using AI to augment security operations increases network and system visibility, thus allowing round the clock monitoring. Extending the visibility to printers, desktops, laptops and IoT devices ensures end-point security, resulting in optimized cyber operations.
There are many other reasons for integrating AI in cybersecurity operations. It enhances security by automatically identifying an attack in different phases like; hidden communications such as command-and-control; lateral movement; internal reconnaissance; data exfiltration; abusing account credentials; and attacking campaigns, including mapping hosts and related attack indicators.