Slashdot Mirror
Harnessing Artificial Intelligence To Build an Army of Virtual Analysts
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.
So, when they publish their findings will someone modify it to make an army of virtual hackers?
Because that would be awesome.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
More snake oil. None of this matters when dumb little suzy clicks the .exe or .pdf, everytime.
>> 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?
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 instead of looking for a silver bullet.
Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing
HAL, are you blocking all my ummm work related internet access
Hopefully someone trip on his cord or accidentally unplug him while cleaning.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
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.
When was the last time anyone other than Timothy posted an article on Slashdot? (I gave up after scrolling through to Saturday) This guy must be the last man standing, working 24/7 after some sort of staff reduction.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
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.
At the bottom of the
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...
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Is this what finally leads to the Singularity or Skynet?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
This could be a wonderful technology but I'll bet the bloopers will be something else at times. It could be sort of like Baby Bush invading the wrong nation.