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Harnessing Artificial Intelligence To Build an Army of Virtual Analysts

Posted by timothy on from the must-use-the-phrase-do-my-bidding dept.

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.

4 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. Hmmm ... by gstoddart · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.
  2. Be careful of what you wish for... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 4, 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.

    1. Re:Be careful of what you wish for... by ultranova · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      No, it boils down to having the computer check the log. Meanwhile, since your skillset has now been automated, back to McDonald's.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

  3. There's still a great advantage for the human by mr_mischief · · Score: 3, 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.