Integrating Artificial Intelligence into Cybersecurity: Protecting IP, Data, and Networks with AI

In recent years we have seen a surge in the way companies have leveraged technology to drive new revenue streams and create a unique competitive advantage in the marketplace. The companies that have been the most successful are the ones using Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is already being used by hundreds of companies all over the world. We have seen retailers being able to predict what their customers will order based on their previous order history, car manufactures using vehicle data to provide a better driving experience and even locally in Australia we have seen Domino’s using AI to help grow their sales and store numbers.

But what does this have to do with cybersecurity…….?

Whether you are an organisation not yet using AI, or you are already experimenting with it, is important to protect the intellectual property that provides your organisation with the competitive edge.

Furthermore, protecting the intellectual property is just one piece of the puzzle. It is just as important to secure sensitive personal and financial data and ensure that network applications continue to operate efficiently without the threat of outside interferences. These issues are becoming the overriding concerns of boards of directors, executives, and security professionals for enterprises and government agencies around the globe.

That’s because on the other side, adversaries of all stripes are lining up to cause harm to your organization: free-lance hackers who just want to cause mayhem, cybercriminals wanting to make a quick buck, and murky quasi-state supported bad actors that are ideology-driven. The battleground is cyberspace. Game on.

The weapons and defenses being used are moving at breakneck speed, and the attack surface is rapidly expanding. While vendors can’t control the bad actors, they can certainly use every resource at their disposal to minimize the threat landscape and protect at-risk networks. And, increasingly, those resources revolve around both threat intelligence and artificial intelligence. This is where Fortinet comes in.

Tools of the Trade

With the increasing threat spectrum, Fortinet provides the tools organizations of any size need in order to keep up with cybercriminals. Fortinet was an early adopter of AI, employing it to classify malware, teach machines to analyse advanced attacks, and produce smarter defensive mechanisms for enhanced protection.

And Fortinet continues to innovate new advanced tools to help detect, mitigate, and prevent fast-moving threats. For instance, their Anti-Exploit Engine (AEE) only focuses on samples that actually succeed in exploiting a vulnerability, thereby reducing the number of ‘false-positive’ that can slow down traditional security systems. To speed up the process further, they have developed a technique known as AutoCPRL (Content Pattern Recognition Language) that targets families of malware, sometimes in excess of 200,000 variants, with a single CPRL signature, reducing storage requirements and super-charging throughput.

Proactive Threat Intelligence

This is how Fortinet is different than other security vendors, with more than 200 full-time researchers hard at work in seven FortiGuard Labs located across the globe, Fortinet is at the forefront of delivering proactive, Intent-Based Network Security (IBNS). Using their own ANN (artificial neural network) clusters for deep-inspection and detection, patented cognitive artificial intelligence systems for analysis, machine-learning to create dynamic algorithms and, ultimately, machine-to-machine defences to thwart advanced persistent threats (ATP) and advanced evasion techniques (AET), Fortinet is building and delivering world-class defence-in-depth. With these powerful tools, orchestrated and disseminated by the Fortinet Security Fabric, organisations now have the resources to stay one step ahead of their adversaries, whatever their motivation.

These are just a few of the innovations that now protect more than 255,000 customers around the world. In our next post we’ll talk about some of the other innovations that organisations can use to protect their IP resources against a growing threat landscape and increasingly determined cybercriminals.