Cybersecurity

AI for cybersecurity is a hot new thing—and a dangerous gamble

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”).

Using machine learning and AI to help automate threat detection and response can ease the burden on employees, and potentially help identify threats more efficiently than other software-driven approaches.