Defense against cyber attacks through new technologies
Author: Jochen Werne – published by Der Bank-Blog – 15 February 2019
Cyber crime has become a serious threat to business, politics and private individuals since a long time. New technologies based on the use of artificial intelligence might offer more security.
The fight against cyber threats has become significantly more complex for global government organisations, businesses, and individuals in recent years. Technical protection of IT systems and infrastructures and thus data security in the narrower sense are no longer the only issues. Companies, for example, need to address the much broader concept of information security.
Solutions based on artificial intelligence could prove helpful in the fight against cybercrime. According to a study by the IBM Institute for Business Value, the spread of intelligent, AI-based security solutions will increase significantly in the coming years.
Technical protective measures have long since been based on machine learning, for example, to identify spam or phishing e-mails or to record trends and anomalies in large amounts of data – both in data traffic within the corporate network and in its external connections.
AI systems for the identification of cyber attacks
In future, for example, systems might also be able to identify hidden channels in the corporate network through which cyber criminals attempt to acquire data. AI’s greatest strength, pattern recognition, enables automated detection of a wide range of anomalies and security incidents. For this purpose, however, AI-based systems must also learn to distinguish between common IT failures and cyber attacks. In addition, self-learning algorithms need to take internal corporate processes into account to come up with precise results.
In the near future, according to a forecast by Christian Nern, former Head of Security Software DACH at IBM Germany and today Partner at the Consulting firm KPMG, AI-based security analysis systems will be able to detect and fend off attacks proactively. Then, according to the former IBM security software chief, the confrontation between cyber criminals and security officers could possibly take place directly between the AI systems they use.
Germany as a pioneer country
Germany, which considers itself a pioneer country in the fields of learning systems and artificial intelligence, has already launched a platform for artificial intelligence on this topic initiated by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF): “Learning Systems”. The platform with its 200 members brings together leading experts from science, business and society and deals with technological, economic and social issues relating to the development and introduction of learning systems on an interdisciplinary and cross-sector basis.
One of the seven working groups deals in particular with IT security, privacy, law and ethics. The composition of the topics in this group shows the interwoven culture-specific discussions that will later lead to scenarios, recommendations, guidelines and roadmaps.
Intelligent combination of available modules
As often in cyber security topics, there is no patent solution for the numerous questions and challenges. A company-wide risk management system, which establishes appropriate technical and organisational measures and also takes into account findings from psychology and cultural studies, seems to be a sensible way forward.
The right balance between security awareness and security, individual freedom paired with increased personal responsibility as well as support through technology and organisational structure is probably the most promising approach in the current state of research and technology to effectively meet the challenges for information and IT security.