According to a report, as cyber threats become more sophisticated and data volumes exceed human analytical capabilities, artificial intelligence (AI), is emerging as a game changer in the ongoing battle of federal cybersecurity.
The report “AI-powered Cybersecurity – Why Government Agencies Must Adapt” produced by Scoop News Group, and sponsored by Microsoft, identifies a number of recent developments that have made it urgent for government agencies adopt AI-powered solutions in order to safeguard critical assets with greater precision.
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AI-enhanced threat. The integration of AI capabilities into agency cyber solutions has become more urgent due to the ongoing attacks on U.S. government data systems by nation states and criminal adversaries. Microsoft’s Threat intelligence unit, which tracks more than 300 unique threat actors, has found that adversaries are increasingly leveraging AI in order to increase the speed, scale and sophistication of their attack. The report highlights the rising tide of cybercrime-as-a-service attacks, underscoring the escalating nature of a technological arms race.
The data deluge. According to the report the biggest challenge for agencies is the crushing amount and increasing velocity data that cyber specialists have to analyze and act on. Jason Payne, Microsoft Federal Chief Technology officer, said that cybersecurity is increasingly becoming a data-science problem rather than a technology issue. AI-powered solutions provide a scalable solution for data analysis, and in particular security data. This allows agencies to identify patterns, anomalies and potential vulnerabilities, which would otherwise go undetected.
AI powered observability: AI driven solutions also enable agencies to observe threats and respond faster, and have the agility to adapt security postures to address evolving attacks. This is according to Steve Faehl. Microsoft Federal Security Chief Tech Officer. He says that the report shows “a lot of benefits from using threat intelligence and AI” to harvest all this signal coming from zero trust capabilities that agencies have implemented. This is important because most agency security centers “don’t employ many people to perform that [analysis], and being able instead to leverage AI to harvest these insights automatically and surface then is a great force multiplyer for government.”
Shifting Left with AI: AI can also improve cybersecurity by helping software development teams to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities early in the development cycle. By addressing security concerns early in development, agencies are able to significantly improve the resilience of their applications and systems and accelerate software development. Payne says AI tools aren’t just for “net new development”. It’s also valuable for identifying and resolving potential vulnerabilities in legacy code.
AI-enhanced products for security. The report highlights a variety of cybersecurity products that use AI to improve cybersecurity. These include platforms for unifying data and detecting and responding endpoint threats. It also includes tools to manage multi-cloud identities.
The report acknowledges, however, the inevitable demand for “AI as a Service,” which would give agencies access to cutting-edge AI capability without requiring them build and maintain a complex infrastructure.
“The power AI will bring us to a point where we can go beyond just empowering analysts to do what we’ve always done, and start addressing intractable problems by tackling things that we wouldn’t have thought of tackling without those additional abilities,” concludes Faehl.
Download the full report for more information about the increasing role AI plays in cybersecurity.
This article has been produced by Scoop News Group and sponsored by Microsoft.