Tech giant Google has launched the AI Cyber Defense Initiative to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to strengthen cybersecurity and reverse the “defender’s dilemma,” the company said in a statement . blog post.
A key initiative in this regard is the open source of Magika, an AI-based tool for file type identification to detect malware. It is already used to protect several Google products. “Magika outperforms conventional file identification methods, delivering 30% improved overall accuracy and up to 95% greater accuracy on traditionally difficult to identify, but potentially problematic, content such as VBA, JavaScript, and Powershell,” indicates the Google blog.
“Magika, Google’s AI-powered cyber defense tool, is essential to this new initiative. As it is already used effectively to secure Gmail, Google Drive and secure browsing, the developer community will see value in adopting it to create more targeted defense tools,” said Deepak Kumar, founding analyst at BMNxt Business and Market Advisory.
Google also announced the creation of a new cybersecurity AI group made up of 17 startups from the UK, US and EU. “This will help strengthen the transatlantic cybersecurity ecosystem with internationalization strategies, AI tools and the skills to use them,” the company said on its blog.
The company also announced $2 million in research grants and strategic partnerships to support research at several institutes, including the University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon and Stanford. Google would also expand its $15 million Google.org cybersecurity seminar program across Europe. The program helps universities train the next generation of cybersecurity experts from underserved communities.
The AI Cyber Defense Initiative builds on Google Secure AI Framework (SAIF)that Google launched last year to mitigate risks associated with AI systems, such as “model theft, poisoning of training data, injection of malicious input via rapid injection and extraction of confidential information in training data”.
