( solarseven / dreamstime )Chalk one up to a new generation of artificially intelligent software that adapts to hackers’ constantly evolving tactics. “Machine learning is a very powerful technique for security — it’s dynamic, while rules-based systems are very rigid,” says Dawn Song, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s Artificial Intelligence Research Lab. “It’s a very manual intensive process to change them, whereas machine learning is automated, dynamic and you can retrain it easily.” Hackers are themselves famously adaptable, of course, so they too could harness machine learning to create fresh mischief and overwhelm the new defences. Besides using machine learning to secure their own networks and cloud services, Amazon and Microsoft are providing the technology to customers. Or hackers could tamper with the data used to train the algorithms and warp it for their own ends—so-called poisoning.

Source: thestar January 03, 2019 17:48 UTC