Businesses are embracing AI as a defence against cyberthreats

LogRhythm, the security intelligence company, has revealed that process and software inefficiencies play a major role in slowing down an organisation’s ability to detect and respond to cyberthreats, but that AI is changing things.

Research from the company has shown that over one-third of IT decision makers say their teams spend at least three hours a day on tasks that could be handled by better software. Additionally, the majority think the average cybersecurity professional wastes as much as 10 hours a week due to inadequate software. Despite this, 56% of respondents in APAC depend on software to prioritise threats for them.

The study, conducted by Widmeyer, which surveyed 751 IT decision makers from the US, UK and Asia Pacific (APAC), also found that 88% of respondents view insider threats as a dangerous and growing concern in defending their organisations.

“The proliferation and innovation of business-enabling technology combined with the speed of today’s advanced hackers to adopt and adapt to the latest technology is making it increasingly difficult - if not impossible - for security teams to evolve their rapid threat detection and response capabilities as quickly as their adversaries,” said James Carder, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and VP of LogRhythm Labs.

The good news is that artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a critical weapon that organisations can use to fight the cyber war. Notably, just under half of the IT executives surveyed use AI. The study also indicates that, among organisations that do rely on AI, more than 90% believe it has improved the effectiveness of their cybersecurity operations.

AI in the cloud has the potential to leverage deep learning across millions of customer deployments. As a result, cloud-based AI can become faster, more accurate and more intelligent than on-premise alternatives, providing organisations with clear visibility into user-based threats that would otherwise go undetected.

“Applying AI throughout the threat lifecycle will eventually automate and enhance entire categories of security operations centre (SOC) activity and enable increasingly effective detection of real threats,” said Chris Brazdziunas, VP of products at LogRhythm. 

“AI can continuously learn what is normal and evolve to register even the subtlest changes in behaviour models that suggest a breach might be occurring. By eliminating the noise and accurately detecting true threats, AI enables organisations to minimise false positives and be more productive.”