IBM announced that more than 40 global clients in industries as varied as financial services, healthcare and education have joined the IBM Watson for Cyber Security beta program. The program uses the Watson AI to provide security services to these companies. Clients include Sun Life Financial, SCANA, California Polytechnic State University and Avnet.
The AI will help to identify and prioritise threats, allowing security analysts to make better and faster decisions. Watson uses machine learning and natural language processing to pull out the relevant information from large amounts of data. Sandy Bird, Chief Technology Officer, IBM Security, says “Customers are in the early stages of implementing cognitive security technologies. Our research suggests this adoption will increase three fold over the next three years, as tools like Watson for Cyber Security mature and become pervasive in security operations centres. Currently, only seven percent of security professionals claim to be using cognitive solutions.”
IBM Watson can determine if a security event or offence matches with the behaviour of any known malware or cybercrime campaign. If so, then Watson can pull the relevant background information, and known approaches for tackling the malware or attack. IBM Watson also helps by providing contextual information about the behaviour which will allow a security analyst to better decide if the suspect activity is indeed malicious.