Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 21 | Page 71

INDUSTRY WATCH MACHINE LEARNING MAKES SECURITY TEAMS BETTER, AND VICE VERSA. HUMAN- MACHINE TEAMS DELIVER THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS. M achine learning is all around us, enriching our online lives everyday. We see it with our own eyes when search engines accurately predict what we’re looking for after we type only a few letters. We feel it protecting our bank accounts, evaluating credit card transactions for signs of fraud. We notice it in selections of articles and ads in online newspapers. We no longer think twice about these conveniences; in fact, it’s hard to imagine online life without machine learning. In relation to cybersecurity, machine learning has been changing the game as a means of managing the massive amounts of data within corporate environments. However, machine learning lacks the innately human ability to creatively solve problems and intellectually analyse events. It has been said time and again that people are a company’s greatest asset. Machine learning makes security teams better, and vice versa. Human-machine teams deliver the best of both worlds. Machine learning allows endpoint security to continually evolve to stop new attack tactics The Dark Web is driven by intelligent ‘bad actors’ who are often financially motivated to create new threats www.intelligentcio.com with new attack techniques. Security becomes personal when you consider the people behind the attacks, making the human-machine team the best sustaining defence. CSOs empower security operations to blend the best elements of art and science, where security team employees provide creative responses and leverage machine learning to provide high- performance scientific responses. While machine learning can detect patterns hidden in the data at rapid speeds, the less obvious value of machine learning is providing enough automation to allow humans the time and focus to initiate creative responses when responses are less obvious. By using a filter for optimisation across the best advantages of both human and machine elements, it’s easier to evaluate the relationship between them. Machine learning adds critical capability to security strategies The process of security researchers analysing malware to develop signatures is still important, but only as a capability to address the large volume of known malware because it cannot be expected to evolve quickly enough to meet INTELLIGENTCIO 71