Enhancing cybersecurity with AI

In a world increasingly dominated by connected machines and technology, cybersecurity is key area that can’t be ignored yet, managing best practices, vulnerabilities and the increasing complexity of malicious actors is a challenge task at the best of times. In order for defenders to keep pace with attackers, they must use every tool available to help manage vulnerabilities and educate users and today, that means AI.

AI has the potential to reimagine the way companies approach cybersecurity, helping strengthen users knowledge and help protect them from targeted attacks while also supporting developers and system maintainers in identifying and addressing vulnerabilities in existing software. As attackers employ AI to create more advanced cyberattacks, it will be increasingly important that companies also adopt AI to help combat that same threat.

AI assisted cybersecurity compliance

A simple, yet key, application of AI to cybersecurity is through copilot systems, which unlock an organization’s entire library of knowledge through an intuitive natural-language interface. A cybersecurity copilot could be an important tool to help users easily understand potential threats and address questions. At the same time, AI copilots could also help automate many time-consuming manual threat identification processes, reducing potential oversights of important threats.

One of the best ways to combat cyber threats is education. Ensuring users understand what constitutes a threat, how to address it and having resources to quickly answer security related questions all go a long way to improving an organization’s cybersecurity readiness. By deploying an AI-powered cybersecurity copilot, all users would have instant access to an organization’s cybersecurity knowledge, accessible through a convenient chat interface. This reduces the amount of training each user needs while also reducing organizations attack surfaces.

Educating users is important but equally so is identifying and addressing potential threats in real time or even proactively. Currently, this process is highly manual and time-consuming, which can lead to potential oversights of important threats. Using an AI copilot connected to domain-specific knowledge, it would be possible to automatically generate Threat Risk Assessments (TRAs) and pass them to humans for review. This process could be highly automated, greatly reducing the amount of manual effort required in identifying and addressing threats while still benefiting from human expertise as key insights are sent for manual review.

Smarter vulnerability management

No matter how much an organization works to educate its workforce, the reality is vulnerabilities will always exist within digital environments, so the next step in a cybersecurity plan is to address them as efficiently as possible. Once again, AI will play a role in both preemptively identifying issues in production code as well as prioritizing existing vulnerabilities to ensure the worst problems get fixed first.

Building a robust cybersecurity foundation must start with application development, unfortunately, the demands on developers are much greater than on attackers since a single vulnerability, no matter how minor, has the potential to compromise an entire system. For human developers, catching every single code vulnerability is nearly an impossible task. However, by employing an AI-enhanced code review solution, it would be possible to check code as it is being written to instantly highlight problems and offer potential solutions. This would help shift the burden of vulnerability management away from developers while also improving system security.

Working to reduce new vulnerabilities in production systems is important but ensuring no single vulnerability makes its way into production is impossible. From newly discovered exploits to issues with 3^rd party vendors or human error, ensuring no attack vectors exist is an unattainable goal. AI will help minimize new vulnerabilities and identify existing ones, but it can also play a key role in classification. Using a specially trained AI model, the process of analyzing and categorizing new vulnerabilities could be highly automated, ensuring the largest vulnerabilities get addressed first and that developers can begin work quickly with all the information they need already precompiled by AI for them.

AI is a powerful tool and, in the wrong hands, a dangerous threat to cybersecurity. While at the same time, in the right hands, a key element in combating those same threats. Intelligently employing AI solutions to address long standing cybersecurity challenges while also elevating cybersecurity intelligence will be important elements of companies cybersecurity plans going forward, ensuring they are ready to address threats old, new and as of yet, unimagined.

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Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens’ software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today’s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Accelerating transformation.