Banks are Employing AI for Cybersecurity Needs: This Week in AI

UK Firms Turn to AI for Help with Hacking

Over half of businesses in the UK faced a hack just this year, according to Hiscox, up from 40 percent last year. The huge jump in threats is causing business owners in the UK and all over the world to start to pay close attention to their network security measures and look to AI as a solution for problems that are too big for a human to solve.

Research from Hicox also found that three quarters of the firms ranked as novices in terms of cybersecurity preparedness.

It’s estimated the average total cost of a data breach is a whopping US$3.86 million. Unfortunately, businesses are unprepared to fully prevent, detect, and respond to the growing number, and sophistication of threats.

Ransomware attacks occur every 14 seconds, according to a Cyber Security Ventures Official Annual Cybercrime Report. Given the billions of daily attacks, businesses are turning to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities to help shore up a scarcity of cybersecurity experts.

Once a criminal has penetrated your organization, the most important factor is to reduce the mean time to respond. This means reducing the window from compromise of the first system to the complete removal of all traces of activity. Right now the mean time to respond to an incident is 69 days and 197 days to identify, according to the Ponemon Institute.

Banking Invests Big Bucks into AI for Cybersecurity

The Global Banking and Finance Review claims that cyberattacks have cost nearly $360 billion per year in losses every year over the past three years. In recent years, global ransomware attacks, such as WannaCry, have put financial institutions on edge, and many banks are finally investing in artificial intelligence to combat hackers.

As AI in cybersecurity advances so too do the methods of hackers, who are also beginning to employ artificial intelligence in their hacking techniques. The banking industry seems to be waking up to this fact and investing in their security.

Banks are notoriously private about their cybersecurity measures because just knowing what methods are being used is a weakness to the institution that hackers can take advantage of.

AI vendors offering cybersecurity products to banks have raised a collective $757 million. What this means is that despite the fact that the large banks are not publicizing their cybersecurity AI projects as much, banks and venture capitalists see a fit for deploying AI in cybersecurity.

What Works Better for Cybersecurity: Humans or Machines? The Debate Continues

That’s the question 10,000 respondents had to answer in a global survey from YouGov.

More than 25 percent said they would prefer AI-driven Cybersecurity to people managing their security.

The statistic has varied reactions. Some will hear that number and be shocked by how high it is, and they are most likely misinformed by just how much AI can do to solve major issues the cybersecurity industry is having.

Others in the field themselves would be shocked by how low.

Another statistic that stood out from the study was that 67 percent of respondents were sure their actions were consistent with good online security practices.

The fact that so many people were so confident they were doing as much as they could to protect themselves is alarming when only a quarter of the same group considered AI to be a better option.

Right now having humans as the primary gatekeepers of cybersecurity is just not feasible anymore. Already the field is lacking enough working professionals to fill all of the cybersecurity jobs opening up, not to mention how many hours are wasted by those teams doing tasks that could be automated by AI and made to run much more efficiently.

Not to mention AI-powered security systems like MixMode’s can respond to a threat within minutes when a human would struggle to detect it in days, weeks, possibly even months or years.