AI Cybersecurity for SaaS Products

For decades Artificial Intelligence was just a concept. But, with recent advances in practical application, AI has spread across the technology market and become a core necessity of many organizations. We see the implementation of AI in the field of medicine, education, weather forecasting, and other industries.

A lesser known but powerful example is the use of Artificial Intelligence in cybersecurity. With the application of Artificial Intelligence, the techniques within cybersecurity have improved drastically. AI (Artificial Intelligence) Cybersecurity demands countermeasures, effectiveness, automation, and predictions, which humans cannot do every day, so AI can help in all these problems.

Whatever humans can do, AI can do better and faster. AI is not here to replace cybersecurity experts, but rather complement their efforts by sharing some of their tasks. Conventional cybersecurity solutions utilize fixed algorithms that cannot adapt according to the changing nature of cyberattacks of the current market. On the other hand, Artificial Intelligence is flexible. It can quickly analyze and learn from millions of datasets. Also, AI refines its techniques by learning from past experiences. All these attributes make AI an efficient way to manage the entire attack process—identifying the attack, detecting the target of the attack, and then proposing its countermeasures.

Cyberattacks are growing rapidly. A study from the University of Maryland states that one cyberattack is carried out every 39 seconds. Another report from the top financial and security organizations state that around 2 million cyberattacks were carried out in 2018, resulting in a total loss of $45 billion. If the same ratio is to be applied in 2021, these attacks can cause damage of $6 trillion. Human efforts are clearly not enough to keep pace with hackers on this scale. That is why we need to implement AI in the security model of our organizations. Some AI applications that can be used to enhance cybersecurity are discussed below.

You can hire a force of AI (Artificial Intelligence) Cybersecurity experts to continuously monitor the security of your information system, but their efforts can never keep up with the dynamically changing cyberattacks. In such an event, the AI algorithms can be trained to detect even the minutest malicious code that is secretly hiding in the form of useful information in your system.

AI improves itself by learning from various datasets in the form of attack patterns from previous attacks. So, when the attacker attempts to compromise your system next time, AI will have a better chance of predicting the hacker’s moves by analyzing their past activities, even before they can enter the system. With Artificial Intelligence controlling your security, your organization can stay one step ahead of the attackers by planning the countermeasures before the attacker launches an attack.

At the same time, you can also patch the potential vulnerabilities in your system identified by AI. You can utilize AI to generate reports based on the trends of the market that can help you in strategizing the defense of your system. Previously, this process was carried out based on suggestions and guesses that “this type of attack could happen.” But now with actual datasets, you can prepare a better plan to keep up, or in some cases, stay ahead of the attackers.

The reports generated by AI can not only be used to learn attack patterns but can also be helpful for analyzing the weak points in your system. It is inevitable that your system cannot be foolproof. Where a cybersecurity expert will take much longer to identify threats in the existing system, AI will have no issue processing a large amount of data in a short period of time.

Based on the security analysis carried out by AI, you can allocate your resources to any specific vulnerability or can formulate a countermeasure in case of a cyberattack.

The applications of AI in user authentications are becoming more and more common. We even see them in consumer devices like iPhone Face Lock. This is because modern-day authentication techniques like 2FA and biometric verifications are not enough to prevent attackers from bypassing the verification process. The AI-powered biometric solutions make it harder for attackers to fool user verification.

The attacker cannot run a keylogger to check an unlimited number of combinations for your password, since AI will detect that a real user would not enter a wrong password hundreds of  times in a row. The attacker cannot DDOS a server, because AI will check whether the requesting node is legit or not.

Let’s take Apple Face Lock as an example. According to Apple claims, the built-in neural engines and infrared sensors identify 30,000 multiple reference points across the face. After this process, a vector model of extracted facial features is generated and compared to already stored user data using Artificial Intelligence to verify the user.

These applications of AI prove that AI can play a crucial role in the user verification process. Attackers can no longer find workarounds to fool AI user authentication techniques.

There is a chance that humans will make mistakes, but computers repeat programmed processes endlessly without deviation. It is possible that you have an airtight plan to defend your system, but something goes wrong due to human error. On the flip side, AI can handle any number of tasks and will handle them precisely. That is the power of AI. Humans formulate the plan and AI handles the computations and repetitive tasks, executing them precisely every time.

As compared to a small-scale development environment, SaaS Companies are more vulnerable to cybersecurity threats. The technology enterprises are always competing with each other. Having poor cybersecurity practices in your organization can drag you down against your competitors in the market. SaaS Business Infrastructure is vulnerable, for that mere human expertise are not enough. Sooner or later Artificial Intelligence will become your only choice to improve the overall AI (Artificial Intelligence) Cybersecurity.

AI can efficiently handle tasks which are much more complex in nature or tasks that require automation. The attackers, however, can also utilize the AI power to attack your organization and you cannot defend such advanced attacks only with the manpower. After all, technology was always meant to aid humanity and never to replace them.

In a report, published by Capgemini Research Institute, 850 executives of enterprises from 10 different countries were surveyed about AI involvement in Cybersecurity in which they admitted that cybersecurity is the need of the hour. The attackers are using Artificial Intelligence to pull intelligent and dynamic attacks on larger enterprises, where the human teams are clearly not enough to counter these attacks. Some of these executives had experience with AI-powered cybersecurity solutions, so they highlighted few of its benefits in their organization:

• Three out of five organizations stated that AI has enhanced the capabilities of their cyber analysts in terms of accuracy and efficiency
• According to 69% of enterprises, AI is absolutely necessary to counter cybersecurity threats
• Three out of four executives stated that their firms can quickly respond to the breach now with the help of Artificial Intelligence.

To stay ahead in the competition, and to secure the company assets, more and more companies are incorporating AI in their security infrastructure. The enterprises which have invested in AI-powered cybersecurity solutions are very satisfied. With this, the cybersecurity analysts in these enterprises can now analyze cyber-attacks in a better way and plan to counter them in time.

AI is a technology, and like many other technologies, it has limitations:

• Technology is not the property of any one person. This means if organizations can utilize the power of AI to secure their systems, attackers can use it for their malicious purposes. For instance, an attacker can develop an AI virus that will learn the detection pattern of security and penetrate a system by concealing itself from the detection radars.
• An attacker can infect the datasets of the AI defense system to generate false results or create a scenario that favors the attacker. In that case, instead of securing the organization, AI security will cause damage to it.
• The implementation and maintenance of AI in the security model costs a lot of capital.
• Sometimes, it is very difficult to acquire distinct datasets and anomalies which are also accurate, to train the AI system.

Talk to Cybersecurity Trusted Advisor at IRM Consulting & Advisory