“Artificial intelligence is the most important weapon against cybercrime.

IT teams are increasingly using Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a weapon in the fight against cybercrime. This is the result of research carried out by the Ponemon Institute on behalf of Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.

The survey was conducted among 4,000 security and IT professionals in the United States, Europe and Asia. With the study, HPE Aruba wanted to gain insight into why security flaws are so difficult to solve, and what kind of technologies and processes are needed to stay one step ahead of cybercriminals.

“Despite huge investments in cyber security programs, our research showed that most companies are still unable to stop advanced, targeted attacks. In doing so, 45 percent believe they are not exploiting the full potential of their defence arsenal, ranging from 10 to 75 security tools deployed simultaneously,” said Larry Ponemon, chairman of the board of Ponemon Institute.

The research shows that machine learning and AI are requirements for detecting and stopping attacks on users and IoT devices. For example, 68 percent say that AI-based security solutions can help reduce the number of false positives.

63 percent say it helps to increase the effectiveness of their team, 60 percent say it helps to ensure more efficient research. And according to 56 percent, it enables them to detect and combat attacks more quickly. Currently, a quarter of respondents already use some form of an AI-based security solution. 26% intend to use such a product in the next twelve months.

IoT

And three-quarters of IT security teams say they don’t believe their IoT devices are safe. According to 60 percent, even simple IoT devices are a threat. Two-thirds also indicate that their devices are not protected against attack.

However, the teams do indicate effective approaches to protect IT environments. This approach consists of continuous monitoring of network traffic, closed loop detection and response systems and the detection of behavioural abnormalities in similar groups of IoT devices.

63 percent of the respondents also stated that access control is an important element of their security strategy. Having detailed information about applications (71 percent), endpoints (69 percent), the cloud (64 percent) and networks (63 percent) is also very important.

More than half of the respondents said it is difficult to protect expanding and fading IT perimeters due to the requirement to support simultaneous IoT, BYOD, mobile and cloud initiatives (55 percent).