December 11, 2015
As businesses wind down for the holiday period, they’ll need to keep their cyber defenses up. While executives are tucking into their dinners, hackers will be trying to tuck into their businesses’ data. High profile breaches this year at organizations ranging from Anthem Healthcare to Ashley Madison and the US government’s Office of Personnel Management are a reminder of the threats that lurk online. And they raise the question of whether the cyber security industry can come up with a powerful new tool to frustrate the bad guys.
There’s been plenty of discussion at security conferences about the impact that machine learning will have on the cyber landscape. A subset of artificial intelligence, it involves the use of powerful algorithms that spot patterns and relationships from historical data, and get better over time at making predictions about brand new data sets based on this experience. Companies such as Amazon and Netflix use machine learning to help drive their recommendation engines, and banks and other financial institutions have long used it to tackle credit card fraud.