AI Will Reshape the Cybersecurity World in 2021

Recently, cybersecurity has become a darling of the IT industry thanks to mushrooming of data (from both consumers and businesses), resulting in increased cyber-crimes. Examples of such data breaches include stealing credentials like passcodes, injecting malware to temper with networks, social engineering, permission maladministration, and insider threats. The exponential increase of these incidents has fuelled the adoption of artificial intelligence to introduce efficient and precise data defense mechanisms.

Besides, the application of AI to counter these criminal actions has brought defensive promises to cybersecurity. Doubtless, IT pundits concur that AI-enabled cybersecurity is a sure bet in 2021. The industry will be flooded with countless AI security solutions. Cybersecurity providers will step up AI development to merge human and machine understanding to outpace cybercriminals' goal of staging an arms race.

Often, a mere passcode bars cybercriminals from accessing your user account, might it be a social network account or workplace portal. Unfortunately, it’s been established the majority of account users create ‘weak’ and ineffective passwords. Additionally, they use the same passcode across multiple platforms, making it easy for hackers to access several applications a victim uses through simple methods like Brute force attacks. You can avoid such threats by adopting biometric authentication. Whereas this has as well been vulnerable to cyber threats, the evolution of Artificial Intelligence algorithms has increased the accuracy and prevention of suspicious elements.

In 2021, we’re expecting countless AI developments in cybersecurity applications. Specifically, AI is predicted to “lend a hand” and supplement human efforts in the detection and prevention of cyber threats. AI-powered data storage solutions will be among the top methods of threat mitigation. This article addresses the various areas of AI development come 2021.

Addressing the shortage of skills in cybersecurity

The current skills gap coupled with staff working from home is an advantage to hackers. They have a better chance to execute heinous activities. And since hackers focus on areas of futility, enterprises will require to adopt effective measures to stay secure. In the past few years, artificial intelligence has become a popular defense solution against cyber threats, identifying attack patterns, suspicious network activities, et al. Although its adoption has fueled competition between threat perpetrators and threat protectors, in 2021, AI will vindicate itself by reducing bandwidth for industry leaders who are toiling to protect their businesses against attacks.

AI organizations will automate all security processes against incidents like phishing, hijacking, ransomware, malware, and more. Rather than the cybersecurity industry grappling to attract new talent for the skills gap, AI will liberate the existing Pit experts to perform other duties like employee training and administration tasks. Moreover, the incorporation of AI ensures defense against ransomware, phishing, MitM, password, and other unknown software and hardware attacks.

Solving entitlement problems in cloud adoption

Cybersecurity professionals agree that the adoption of cloud solutions is on the rise. Nevertheless, since resources are usually generated and revolved in minutes or seconds, IT security teams are faced with the challenge of managing the entitlement of those clouds, that is, who is permitted to access these cloud workloads, for how long, and at what time. Conventional tools cannot work in such environments.

Fortunately, AI-powered solutions can assist in detecting access-affiliated risks across these environments by identifying humans and machines and assess their roles, identities, and entitlements. The establishment of granular visibility enables businesses to meet their compliance requirement and impose least-privilege access, even where cloud environments are highly distributed. Artificial Intelligence is also used to implement baselines to cloud configurations to detect and report any change or irregularity that raises the alarm and self-heal the detected misconfiguration.

Artificial intelligence will become ingrained in authentication schemes

It's been established that when AI is leveraged in authentication processes, the framework becomes far more dynamic, experiences little friction, and offers real-time and accurate decisions. Using Privileged Access Management (PAM) as an example, we all appreciate that multi-factor authentication is an access protocol that requires users to submit several authentication factors combined with their dynamic behavior. This reduces the risks of making wrong authentication decisions. Then think how things will be in 2021! AI will be used more often to prevent cyber threats and create real-time risk scores in the authentication stage.

Finding the unknown unknowns

Anomaly identification and network/system analyses are paramount environments of unmonitored learning, specifically ideal for cybersecurity. Besides, counting on historical information for training isn't wise, better technology is required. AI-enabled solutions will be used to merge both the monitored and unmonitored machine learning to detect fraud across the whole customer journey. Companies will take unconventional approaches of awarding their clients access to their e-business information, implying these decisions won't be made anyhow.

AI and security operations

Protecting your enterprise's infrastructure and apps requires proper co-relation between the fundamental data and data sets of IT operations. In other words, both the user data and machine data should flow smoothly through the digital infrastructure. Security algorithms model patterns of historical behaviors, and in the process, anomalies and deviations associated with these patterns are identified in real-time. By adopting AI, the entire process would be automated, and bad actors will be blocked in real-time.

AI will bolster security in remote environments: Today, employees are flexible to work thousands of miles away from their employer, implying there are many endpoints scattered all over the world, vulnerabilities have multiplied. In 2021, AI-enabled security measures will be applied to monitor and control all these endpoints to keep businesses secure.

In summary, considering the significance of AI on cybersecurity, businesses and non-profit organizations will heavily count on AI-powered security solutions to stay protected. Finally, these predictions show that the future of cybersecurity is bright, thanks to artificial intelligence.