Here’s how Canadian businesses can apply ML-powered cybersecurity

While cybercriminals are using new attack vectors like COVID-19-related SMS phishing scams to trick your employees to click on malicious links, thousands of other methods to compromise your data are being created every day. Machine Learning (ML)-powered cybersecurity may be the only practical way to keep ahead of this firehose of malicious activity. As part of a company’s threat defence, a cybersecurity system can be trained via Artificial Intelligence (AI) to become familiar with SMS and other scams so that it can quarantine these and not let them reach their intended recipients.

Here’s how ML-powered cybersecurity can be applied today.

As a tireless member of your cybersecurity staff

Protecting company data is a 24/7/365 operation, but cybersecurity analysts may suffer from exhaustion and therefore commit errors.

ML can support your IT security staff in two ways:

1. It receives and archives inputs from analysts, discerns patterns, and helps them resolve cybersecurity cases that are similar to past ones by diagnosing the symptoms and determining the best solutions.
2. If a case has no precedent, the AI program can examine that case’s characteristics and recommend the best IT engineers for the job based on their success in resolving similar cases.

As a sword and shield against bad bots

The web is literally crawling with bots — applications that fulfill automated tasks on the internet. Malicious actors either subvert the programming of some bots or build new ones to do their nefarious bidding. Some deliver all sorts of malware, while others take stolen credentials to hijack real accounts or create fake ones to commit fraud.

Your limited staff can’t hope to match the unrelenting barrage of automated bad bots, so you must also deploy an automated solution. However, this solution must be powered by AI because it needs to be able to distinguish legitimate bots (such as search engine crawlers) from bad bots and online human actors.

This AI-powered solution must have ML capabilities so that it can keep pace with ever-evolving cyberthreats. ML-enabled AI does this by identifying undesired results (such as massive data exfiltration), then working backward to recognize actions and behaviours that lead to such results.

Armed with this knowledge, the AI has the capacity to thwart threat actors, even if these are completely new and use yet-unknown processes. This is because the actors will ultimately exhibit the same or similar actions and behaviours to obtain the same results.

As proactive protection for endpoints

Before the pandemic, teams used on-premises computers, which are protected by standard antivirus programs and network monitoring tools. When COVID-19 spread like wildfire, however, businesses were forced to let employees work remotely. Most staff had to use their own personal devices, such as PCs, laptops, and smartphones, to accomplish their tasks.

These endpoints have different antivirus programs installed, which may or may not be updated. They access the internet via different types of connections, which may or may not be secure. And your staff may be using unvetted plugins and apps that may be risky for your network.

To protect these devices — and ultimately, your network — you need AI-driven endpoint protection. This type of protection establishes what it considers to be normal endpoint behaviour. Then, when something out of the ordinary happens, it can take action, such as:

• Flagging the event
• Sending a notification to IT admins
• Rescinding network access rights.

Against cyberthreats, small- and medium-sized businesses such as yours may have been caught on the back foot because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s understandably difficult to prioritize cybersecurity, but with XBASE’s Exponentially Better™ cybersecurity services, your organization can actually catch up and become one step ahead.

To illustrate, we implement enterprise-grade ML-powered cybersecurity solutions from leading providers such as Cisco, McAfee, and Microsoft to suit the needs of our clients, many of which are SMBs. In your case, we’ll evaluate your predicament, examine the systems you currently employ, and help you look into the tools you’re considering for the future. Then, we’ll help you optimize your cybersecurity strategy and recommend solutions that feature state-of-the-art AI capabilities — capabilities that free up your hands and allow you to focus on growing your business.

To discover more about how we will protect your business, read our free eBook, then schedule a FREE consultation today.