IT Leaders Believe AI is a ‘Silver Bullet’ for Threats

IT Leaders Believe AI is a ‘Silver Bullet’ for Threats: The majority of IT decision makers have believed the hype surrounding artificial intelligence as a means to enhance the cyber security threats.

An ESET poll of over 900 IT leaders in U.S, UK and Germany who found a disappointing 75% which believes that AI is a ‘silver bullet’ to helping them counter the online threats.

The respondents from the U.S (82%) who much more were willing to believe the hype than their counterparts in the UK (67%) and the Germany (66%).

Most of those polled who believed that AI and machine learning will for sure help their organizations to detect and respond to the threats faster than (79%) and help solve their skills shortages (77%).

This is for sure true that the emerging technology could help the IT teams in this way by spotting the patterns indicative of threats more quickly than the human eyes could, and it will help the cybersecurity team to detect these sorts of issues in much faster ways.

However, that there should never be any technology that should be viewed as a ‘silver bullet,’ according to ESET CTO, Juraj Malcho.

“If the past decades have taught us anything, it’s that some things do not have an easy solution — especially in cyber-space where the playing field can shift in a matter of minutes. In today’s business environment, it would be unwise to rely solely on one technology to build a robust cyber defense,” he said.

“However, it is also interesting to see such a gap between the US and European respondents. The concern is that overhyping this technology may be causing technology leaders in the UK and Germany to tune out. It’s crucial that IT decision makers recognize that, while ML is without a doubt an important tool in the fight against cybercrime, it must be just one part of an organization’s overall cybersecurity strategy.”

In fact, AI also can offer the cyber-criminals a potential advantage, according to the NTT Security EMEA SVP, Kai Grunwitz.

“Just as it helps us find the needle in the haystack – the malware threats hiding in plain sight – it could be also enable to automate the discovery of vulnerability in key systems,” he argued earlier this year.

“Imagine what havoc could be reaped by self-learning malware designed to continually adapt to its environment, with no input required from its masters? As always, the upper hand is with the attacker, who only needs to find one vulnerability to succeed, whereas we defenders must make only one mistake to let them in.”

To the end, around 91% of cyber security professionals who are concerned about hackers who are using AI against them, according to Webroot.