With all the fears of Skynet and thinking machines taking our jobs, lives, wives etc, companies like our partner Watchguard are using security focussed Artificial Intelligence (AI) to beef up their models and take online protection into the future. 

Given the increasing speed and aggressiveness of newly emerging malware, ransomware et al, AI can be a useful tool in recognising and reacting to the data driven global arms race of attack vs defence. A single point of infection can now spread like wildfire in a matter of seconds to take down entire organisations. 

The cost of securing their own infrastructure for online giants such as Amazon, Facebook and Google etc are ballooning year after year, they spent over a hundred billion dollars last year alone, and the search for intelligent based learning programming has never been more at the forefront. 

So, what is Artificial Intelligence? 

Well the goal posts keep moving as machines improve on what they can do, so optical character recognition and converting human speech into text are now not considered AI. In fact, Larry Tesler (invented Cut, Copy n Paste) famously quoted that, ‘Intelligence is whatever machines haven’t done yet’, so beating the world’s best chess player or driving a car without a person at the wheel or fooling a human into thinking they’re speaking to another human also no longer qualifies. 

How does Watchguard use AI then?

To prevent attacks efficiently the software needs to identify potential attacks as early as possible and act like you have a highly trained security analyst on hand 24/7 keeping your company safe. Artificial Intelligence within the Watchguard services acts as a force multiplier enabling the automation of processes, greatly improving the coverage against emerging threats.  

As their AI heuristics continue to improve and mature it will connect all of their platforms to generate the deepest insights, enabling state of the art defences against many incoming and future threats… 

Tony F Paulazzo