Cybersecurity and AI/ML, Before the New Age of AI: A Recap, and a Look Forward | #hacking | #cybersecurity | #infosec | #comptia | #pentest | #ransomware

Ironically, Athena was not only the goddess of war, but also of practical insight and prudent restraint, which captures a lot of the sturm und drang in our current conversations about AI. But I digress. The simple point is that the use of AI/ML in cybersecurity really isn’t all that new. If you haven’t already, check out the five interesting examples listed above.

Differences Between Traditional AI/ML and Generative AI

To be fair, it’s worth calling out the difference between the traditional AI/ML that’s discussed in these particular examples and the generative AI that’s currently capturing our collective imaginations. What kind of analyst would I be if I didn’t attempt to do this using a simple 2-by-2 matrix, as shown below?

• • All five examples (EDR, email security, MDR, data protection, and web application security) fall under the traditional AI/ML column — in which computers perform specific tasks based on pre-programmed rules and algorithms.
  • In all five examples, leading cybersecurity solutions that incorporate AI/ML have aspects of both the “Strong” (e.g., pattern recognition, which generally augments and up-levels current cybersecurity roles) and “Weak” (e.g., process automation, which generally relieves humans from doing certain tasks) rows as representative use cases.
  • Going forward, we can no doubt expect leading cybersecurity solutions to incorporate new capabilities enabled by the generative AI column — with corresponding use cases such as predictions and content creation, as shown below. As always, Aberdeen will incorporate those into its upcoming research projects in cybersecurity.

Source: Aberdeen Strategy & Research, August 2023

Next week, my colleagues and I at Aberdeen will begin sharing some of the key findings and insights from our just-concluded research study on AI in the Enterprise: The State of AI in 2023. Some early examples include: 

• How much are enterprises currently investing in AI-based initiatives as a percentage of their annual IT budgets? 
• How has AI started to affect current jobs in cybersecurity?

And as they say: There’s much, much more. In the meantime, you can keep up with selected research findings across multiple coverage areas, which Aberdeen shares at www.aberdeen.comOpens a new window .