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And are attackers using it to breach your network?
Artificial Intelligence is ruling the stock market and may be on the verge of ruling the world if you believe the business influencers. If it’s as powerful as some say, surely AI can protect your Windows systems from hackers?
The products our new EPS test almost certainly rely on AI-related technologies to detect and protect against attacks. These technologies have been running in the background for about 20 years. We can argue that not only does anti-virus/ endpoint protection use AI, but it’s been doing so for many years, and certainly before Cylance claimed to be the first.
But I did something sneaky there. I slid in the word ‘-related’. Because when people talk about ChatGPT and other popular ‘AI’ tools, they are usually talking about something else. They are amazed by the utility of Machine Learning (ML) systems, which appear to be able to mimic human thought in a rather magical way.
ML is a subset of AI, so it’s related to AI but it isn’t capable of thought. It cannot reason, in the way that we hope future AI systems will. It is great at recognising patterns, but it can make mistakes and it’s not very good at understanding why it makes those mistakes.
As I wrote this introduction, I asked ChatGPT for a fun fact about SE Labs. It claimed we had run a cyber security ‘bake-off’ that involved employees baking “virus-shaped cupcakes [and] firewall-layered cakes.
That sounds fun, and maybe we should do it, but we haven’t, so it’s not a fact. Fun or otherwise.
(I corrected ChatGPT, which responded, “You’re right, I made that up in an attempt to be fun and creative.” Maybe tomorrow’s robot overlords will be “fun and creative” and it won’t be so bad if they take over.)
Being able to match patterns is incredibly useful for cyber security tools, because attackers behave in largely similar ways, with small variations. ML can often detect new variations. Attackers can use ML, as indeed does SE Labs when creating some new threats, to try to evade detection. It’s a cat-and-mouse game, with both sides using computer brainpower to detect or escape detection.
Our new EPS reports are now available.
