As cyber threats become more sophisticated and data volumes exceed human analytical capacity, artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a game-changing factor in the ongoing battle for federal cybersecurity, according to a report. new report.
The report “AI-Powered Cybersecurity: Why Government Agencies Must Adapt,” produced by Scoop News Group and underwritten by Microsoft, identifies several recent developments that are driving the urgent need for government agencies to adopt AI-powered solutions to more deliberately protect critical assets.
AI-enhanced threats. The integration of AI into ongoing attacks on U.S. government data systems by nation-states and criminal adversaries has added new urgency to integrating AI capabilities into agency cybersecurity solutions. According to Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence unit, which tracks more than 300 unique threat actors and organizations, adversaries are increasingly leveraging AI to amplify the speed, scale and sophistication of their attacks. The report highlights the growing wave of cybercrime-as-a-service attacks, underscoring the growing nature of a technological arms race.
The data deluge. The biggest challenge for agencies, the report found, is the overwhelming volume and increasing velocity of data that cyber experts must analyze and act on. “Increasingly, cybersecurity is becoming a data science problem” rather than a technology problem, said Jason Payne, Microsoft’s federal technology director. AI-powered solutions offer a scalable approach to data analysis and security data in particular, enabling agencies to identify patterns, anomalies and potential vulnerabilities that would otherwise go undetected, the report said.
AI-powered observability: Additionally, AI-powered solutions enable agencies to observe and respond to threats more quickly and adapt their security posture to address evolving attacks, according to Steve Faehl, Microsoft’s chief technology officer for federal security. “We’re seeing a lot of early benefits from using threat intelligence and AI to harvest all of these signals from the zero trust capabilities” that agencies have in place, he said in the report. That’s important because most agency security operations centers “don’t have a lot of staff to do that (analysis), so being able to leverage AI to harvest that information automatically and surface it is a huge force multiplier for government.”
Move left with AI: AI can also help improve cybersecurity by helping software development teams identify and mitigate vulnerabilities earlier in the development cycle. By addressing security issues earlier in development, agencies can significantly improve the resiliency of their systems and applications and accelerate software development. AI tools aren’t “just for developing new software,” Payne says. “They’re just as useful for identifying and fixing potential vulnerabilities in existing and legacy code.”
AI-enhanced security products. The report highlights a range of cybersecurity products leveraging AI to improve cybersecurity, including platforms for data unification, endpoint threat detection and response, and the delivery of multi-cloud identity management tools.
However, the report also recognizes the inevitable need and demand for “AI as a Service,” which would allow agencies to access cutting-edge AI capabilities without requiring them to build and maintain their complex infrastructure.
“The power of AI is going to take us to a point where we can go beyond just empowering analysts to do what they’ve always done and start solving intractable problems with things we don’t. would never have thought of solving without these additional tools. capabilities,” concludes Faehl.
Download the full report to learn more about the growing role of AI in cybersecurity.
This article was produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop and funded by Microsoft.
