New cyberthreats are introduced every day at an increasingly rapid pace. Fortunately, for every new threat that’s introduced, someone, somewhere, has figured out how to remediate it and blogged about it.
The problem? With over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being produced around the world daily — and thousands upon thousands of cybersecurity blogs out there — finding the solution to a threat you don’t yet know exists is an impossible human feat. Fortunately, we no longer have to rely solely on human cognizance.
What Does Cybersecurity Today Look Like?
Cognitive computing systems have advanced at a remarkable rate in recent years and are able to contribute tremendously to cybersecurity today. By using tools such as data mining, machine learning, natural language processing and human-computer interaction to mimic the way the human brain works, cognitive systems can help organizations remediate cyberthreats in record time.
Enhancing SOC Analysis
Through the automated ingestion of information — such as research reports and best practices — and the ability to understand both structured and unstructured data, cognitive systems can provide junior analysts with real-time input. This allows them to do the job of a higher-level analyst without the additional years of experience.
Speeding Up Response Time
Remember the impossible-to-find cybersecurity blog holding the answers to today’s latest cyberthreats? By crawling through external intelligence on the Internet, cognitive systems can quickly discover what the next zero-day exploit is — and how to protect against it.
Making the Most of Advanced Analytics
Cognitive security systems may use analysis methods such as machine learning, clustering, graph mining and entity relationship modeling to identify potential threats. This can help speed detection of risky user behavior, data exfiltration and malware before damage occurs.
Strengthening Application Security
By understanding the semantic context of your analytics and data, while simultaneously exploring code and code structures, cognitive systems can take thousands of vulnerability findings, refine results to a small set of actionable items and take you to locations in your code where you can fix them.
Improving Enterprise Risk
In the future, cognitive systems could use natural language processing to find sensitive data in an organization and redact it.
As you can see, artificial intelligence is no longer a dream of the future. Intelligent computers — cognitive computers — exist, and there’s nothing artificial about it. Cybersecurity today can benefit as a result.
Watch the on-demand webinar: Cognition and the Future of Security
IBM Fellow, CTO for IBM Security