How AI Is Helping Keep You Safe Online and In the Real World
AI is a vital component in keeping you safe from cyberattacks online and criminals in the real world.
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is something of a buzzword of late, but it is a very powerful tool in our digital age. One of its most important roles is security - both in our digital and real-world lives.
Here we will briefly explore where it is being used, how it is being used, and provide some current interesting examples.
How is AI being used in security?
AI and machine learning are being employed increasingly around the world to help preserve and improve security in many ways. From helping keep ahead of the fast-paced development of cybersecurity threats to helping law enforcement and security services prevent criminal acts, AI is becoming an essential tool to keep us all safe from malicious, or even dangerous, neer-do-wells.
Here AI can be employed to help, often, under-resourced security operations analysts stay ahead of the curve. AI can, for example, curate all current knowledge of threat intelligence to help provide threat insights almost instantaneously.
This helps reduce response times to cyberattacks considerably. AI can also be trained to learn by consuming billions of data artifacts from structured and unstructured sources.
This could include blogs and news stories and allows the AI, using machine learning, to improve its knowledge of cybersecurity over time. More sophisticated ones, like IBM's Watson, can even employ a form of cyber-reasoning to find relationships between suspicious files or IPs in seconds to minutes.
This greatly improves cybersecurity analysts response times to potential threats.
What companies are working on artificial intelligence security?
There are various companies working on AI security. Many larger organizations, like Microsoft and IBM, also have AI-security departments.
IBM's Watson and Microsoft's Windows Defender are examples of AI-based security solutions.
As we previously mentioned, AI can also help with physical security. Companies like Liberty Defense, a concealed weapon detection company, have been working on an AI-powered solution to help reduce weapon-related crimes.
Called HEXWARE, the weapons detection system uses active 3D imaging and AI to assess and detect threats as groups of people pass its sensors. It was developed at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory can have been designed to be installed at the perimeter of any building.
It can be used both indoors and outdoors and detect both metallic and non-metallic threats. This is one of the few technologies of its kind that doesn't also use facial recognition - which protects the privacy of individuals.
The idea is to allow a site's security to identify a possible threat before it even enters the building.