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As data breaches become commonplace, Artificial Intelligence and machine learning are coming to the aid of cyber security experts.
"Cybercrime is a growing global epidemic. Attackers are targeting organisations and their infrastructure, forcing critical operations to be impacted and in some instances holding organisations to ransom,” Douglas Kennedy, CTO, Aegon Life Insurance, told BusinessLine .
Investing in security
At Aegon Life, he said, each level of defence is constantly being monitored and analysed. The company is investing heavily in security incident and event management and enhancing it through Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
Experts point out that when implemented and trained properly, deep machine learning can enhance cyber security in many ways, mostly by saving resources and defending against attacks in real time.
With the help of AI, security teams can automate a significant part of their workload, giving them more time to focus on developing new defence strategies and fight hackers proactively, officials maintain.
Data breaches
Given the plethora of data being generated every second, and the pace being accelerated by catalysts like the internet of things (IoT), the issue of data security has gained importance. Though the recent massive Marriott/Starwood breach grabbed headlines, there have been innumerable other data breaches, including that of GoDaddy, Orbitz, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon India and Google+.
Even as Google+ announced it is advancing the shutting down of its service from April 2019, there were reports of another data breach involving 52.5 million account holders. The news was confirmed by Google in a blog post.
India accounts for 37 per cent of 4.5 billion global data breaches compromised in the first half of 2018, according to a report.
Breaches in India
Digital security firm Gemalto said in its Breach Level Index, a global database of public data breaches, that almost 1 billion data records have been exposed in India since 2013, when the Index began benchmarking publicly disclosed data breaches.
The firm found that India accounts for 37 per cent of global breaches in terms of records compromised or stolen or revealed.
Given that AI and ML can see patterns in the data collected by companies, they are being resorted to contain further breaches.
“Though common sense is an essential cyber security tool, supporting technology tools for protecting an organisation’s assets and data privacy are paramount,” said Prashant Dhanodkar, Chief Information Security Officer, SBI General Insurance.
Digital footprints
Noting that the digital footprints of individuals (consumers) and organisation are rapidly increasing with the surge of digital transformation, he told BusinessLine , “Organisations are challenged with the daunting task of protecting their data privacy. Security tools are helpful in such a demanding situation for reducing the attack surface an organisation is exposed to.”
Moreover, he added, “in order to reduce the risk and bring in value, cyber security tools need to be tied to business objectives.”
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