Harnessing Artificial Intelligence To Build an Army of Virtual Analysts 41
An anonymous reader writes: PatternEx, a startup that gathered a team of AI researcher from MIT CSAIL as well as security and distributed systems experts, is poised to shake up things in the user and entity behavior analytics market. Their goal was to make a system capable of mimicking the knowledge and intuition of human security analysts so that attacks can be detected in real time. The platform can go through millions of events per day and can make an increasingly better evaluation of whether they are anomalous, malicious or benign.
Hmmm ... (Score:4, Funny)
So, when they publish their findings will someone modify it to make an army of virtual hackers?
Because that would be awesome.
Re: (Score:2)
And AI will make the Republicans even better at this.
*cough* Max Headroom *cough*
Re: (Score:1)
Who will be the first to patent The Borg?
Re: (Score:2)
The Borg always was just about intellectual property. It probably started with something like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Be careful of what you wish for... (Score:5, Funny)
Their goal was to make a system capable of mimicking the knowledge and intuition of human security analysts so that attacks can be detected in real time.
That boils down to letting the expensive firewalls do their job and checking the log files later on. Meanwhile, back to minesweeper.
Re:Be careful of what you wish for... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it boils down to having the computer check the log. Meanwhile, since your skillset has now been automated, back to McDonald's.
Re: (Score:1)
No, it boils down to having the computer check the log. Meanwhile, since your skillset has now been automated, back to McDonald's.
The minimum wage jobs at McDonald's will get automated long before computer security analysts get automated.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
its mostly theater anyway since security is inconvenient and convenience trumps all.
secure systems are not connected to lolcats
Timothy step away from the computer. (Score:1)
Every story on the last three pages was posted by you.
Please let someone else post something.
Everyone else please post something!
Here i'll start Amit Singhal, the longstanding chief of Google Search operations is leaving google after 15 years. http://www.wired.com/2016/02/a... [wired.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Hopefully someone trip on his cord or accidentally unplug him while cleaning.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Whipslash on feb 2nd asking for suggestions on how to make /. better. Other than that no idea.
Bot or no timothy is not making the best choices on story selection...
None of this matters. (Score:1)
More snake oil. None of this matters when dumb little suzy clicks the .exe or .pdf, everytime.
Artificial Gullibility (Score:3)
>> Their goal was to make a system capable of mimicking the knowledge and intuition of human security analysts so that attacks can be detected in real time.
Did they manage to avoid mimicking all the foolishness and gullibility of human security analysts, too?
>> The platform can go through millions of events per day and can make an increasingly better evaluation of whether they are anomalous, malicious or benign.
So, based on this, it sounds like the 'quality' of the service depends on parsing data supplied by (hostile) outside sources. If the system cannot tell when people are deliberately poisoning its knowledge base with feints and false messages, then what? Human supervision? If it needs human security analysts anyways, how much does it gain?
Re: (Score:2)
The system does not require any AI in it's running it requires intelligence in it's setting up. Detectable patterns of communication and control elements. The sources, the timings and the conjunction of similar network transmission types. The idea is to block anything that is not allowed and then tracked what is blocked to ensure reliable data transmissions are allowed. You build up the system by trialling blocking and gradually building up a library or memory sic of allowed communications patterns, timing
RSA is coming! Activate they Hype machine! (Score:2)
With the big RSA security conference on the horizon, expect to see lots of stories about the latest security solutions, especially from start ups.
If you want good security, work on implementing the SANS Top 20 security controls [sans.org] instead of looking for a silver bullet.
why are you blocking all my feeds (Score:2)
HAL, are you blocking all my ummm work related internet access
Re: (Score:2)
There's still a great advantage for the human (Score:4, Insightful)
There's still a great advantage for the human security analyst. The human may not be as fast or as infallible. One may not be as infallible as the AI when things are going smoothly. However, the human will still need to make sure the AI is making sense. Someone needs to make sure the traffic being flagged is consistent with actual traffic. The AI can itself be subverted via code. The AI can have a subtle bug that makes it stop making sense in some obscure edge case that isn't covered well in testing. The human cannot be so easily fooled or subverted. It's going to be a team effort. It's just that it'll be the AI and a handful of humans doing what a much bigger team of humans used to do.
Re: (Score:2)
Nah (Score:2)
That was their secondary fall-back goal.
The primary was to be able to predict stock and commodity markets, or at least sports events. They gave it up because it wasn't really contributing to the greater good of humanity. No, really. Cross my heart.
My AI hacked your AI (Score:1)
Is this what finally leads to the Singularity or Skynet?
Re: (Score:2)
Rinse and repeat. Even cyborg CEO's like pr0n and dancing pigs.
Wonderful! (Score:2)