Deep Learning: Best Route to Foil Malicious Cyber-Attacks on Real-Time Basis

Over the years, attackers have developed various automated malwares and ransomwares, to hastily attack targets and elude internal security measures or protection at the network and endpoint level. Today, hackers are using AI and IoT to develop advanced mobile malware and crack passwords. They are implanting malevolent components into mobile apps through third-parties, which is resulting in the conversion of the affected devices into mobile botnets to perform cybercrimes. Through malwares, botnets allow the ‘botmaster’ to send commands to these captive computers to control their attacks. It gets difficult to detect the threats through encrypted botmaster.

Every year, the number of companies losing data due to cyber-attacks are increasing. They end up investing a large amount of money in retrieving, response and other capabilities that come post attack. The meticulousness of these attacks is so comprehensive that a high percentage of victims choose to pay the ransom.

According to a report by NASSCOM, Data Security Council of India and PwC, the cybersecurity market has been projected to be USD35 billion by 2025. We are in a crucial era to understand that industries need to invest in technology that can thwart threats from ever entering their environment, and not have to deal with the post-attack situation. Traditional security solutions are no longer able to solve the ever-evolving threats. Various contemporary generation of cybersecurity products are dwindling by failing to avert the first-seen, most urbane attacks in real time.

Deep Learning, also known as “deep neural networks”, is an upcoming and disruptive technology that signifies a major dive in the field of cybersecurity. The technology takes inspiration from how the human intellect functions and is an advanced form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) which can be best used in understanding customer behaviour. For example, Facebook claims to interpret the characteristics of a person more accurately than any psychologist because they have access to multiple sets of information ranging from their interest in current topics to the kind of clothes they would like to wear.

However, Deep Learning is at a nascent stage across the world, though it is possible that we are using the advanced version of the technology in one way or the other without knowing it. For example, virtual personal assistants like Siri, Alexa, traffic predictions of google, video surveillance facility that can detect crime before it happens, online customer chatbots, personal feed while surfing social media accounts, product recommendation, etc. These innovations are the applications of Machine learning powered by AI as they collect and refine the information based on your previous involvement with them. Later, this set of data is utilized to render results that are tailored to your preferences.

Deep Learning is recently being used to spot and foil any type of cyber menace. The prediction efficiency of this new technology is instinctive whether a file is malevolent or authentic without any human prying at all. This new structured approach to security eventually improves as datasets grow, to the extent of hundreds of millions of malevolent and authentic files. It recognizes whether a file is malicious or not and evaluates, classifies the specific kind of malware in real time-thereby saving businesses, time and money.

The key benefit over behavioural based solutions such as Deep Learning is detecting threats and immediately implementing the solution to prevent it. In fact, Deep Learning is so effective that there is a constant improvement in performance from 20% to 30% across most benchmarks in computer vision, speech recognition, and text understanding. The technology comes up with high speed to deliver the best accuracy levels with the lowest false positives.

Artificial Intelligence has very quickly become the progressive technology for various sectors, offering the ability to analyse data with a speed and precision never seen before. Deep Learning, being the advanced form of Artificial Intelligence, supporting cutting-edge analytics, will no-doubt play a vital role in the mission to deliver the highest possible quality security to companies and consumers for decades to come.

By Narendra Saini, Head- Product Management, Technology and Services, Unlimit