AI Powered Cybersecurity FortiAI: Virtual Security AnalystTM

Threat Investigation and Response

What is AI-Powered Cybersecurity?

Among its many benefits to cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can identify patterns in massive amounts of data, enabling it to detect trends in malware features and make threat classifications much more rapidly than humans can. An AI-based virtual security operations (SecOps) analyst can rapidly detect and respond to security incidents, assisting human analysts and enabling them to operate at a higher level. AI-powered cybersecurity technologies such as this can be a boon to short-staffed security teams affected by the global cybersecurity skills gap.

While Machine Learning (ML) is the most common type of AI used in cybersecurity designed to solve linear problems e.g. perform a task more efficiently and effectively for a specific situation, Deep Learning (DL) is designed to solve larger complex, non-linear problems by modelling the operation of neurons in the human brain.

AI-based learning algorithms fall into three categories: supervised, reinforced and unsupervised. A supervised ML algorithm must be trained on a large dataset of samples labeled as either benign or malicious. In contrast, Deep Neural Networks (DNN), a Deep Learning model uses reinforced learning i.e. an award-based system of learning, during its pre-training and later transitions to unsupervised learning i.e. self-learning, that does not require a labeled dataset for training and maturity. More importantly, lies in its ability to correlate various category of datasets to make decisions.

A Virtual Security Analyst that can operate in unsupervised mode is a boon to lean SecOps teams that lack the experienced resources to analyze and investigate new threats fully within the shortest period of time. Because of DNN’s innate ability to self-learn, it continuously adapts to the evolving cyber threat landscape including AI-powered cyber attacks (see diagram below).

FortiAI: Virtual Security AnalystTM Overview

There is no question that cyberattacks and threats—ransomware, trojans, cryptomining, worms, etc.—are here to stay, but they are also becoming increasingly sophisticated and dangerous. Cybercriminals are eagerly adopting new innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI) and automation via AI fuzzing, self-learning swarm-based attacks, and expanded Malware-as-a-Service capabilities. Meanwhile, overburdened security operations teams are stuck with traditional security resources and investigation procedures to combat the increasing volume of advanced polymorphic, known, and unknown threats.

AI is paving the way for cybersecurity solutions to stay ahead of evolving threats. Fortinet FortiAI, powered by Deep Neural Networks (DNN), is the industry’s most sophisticated AI security solution. FortiAI is specifically designed to alleviate the tedious manual threat investigation of security alerts and threat response by identifying and classifying threats and malware outbreaks in sub-seconds and blocking them in the network.