A shared responsibility!

‘I need a drink!’

A spur-of-the-moment decision to visit Westfield, Mount Druitt at the time of closure (almost) resulted in a face-to-face encounter with the latest revolution in the cleaning industry namely ‘Ecobot’. This artificial intelligence based autonomous floor scrubber transported me into a not-so-far futuristic world where cybercriminals thrive as both cybersecurity networks and law enforcers are on the verge of losing an endless battle owing to the overwhelming nature of cybercrime. Being a victim of internet scams, fearing the negative consequences of a stolen identity, I established contact with the hierarchy of law enforcement which compelled me to seriously consider seeking the assistance of AI cybercrime investigator; a consideration born out of my desperation to punish the hacker and to stay in control of my device and my realm.    

Internet surfing not only revealed identity theft to be a growing concern but also enlightened me about how predators or crackers establish pathways in the system by finding bugs and faults. A paper written by Bhatele et.al., titled ‘The role of Artificial Intelligence in Cyber Security’ and published on ResearchGate presented the idea that Deep Learning and Machine Learning, the best approaches to dealing with cyber security issues, understood the problem through pattern recognition, collected raw data which was later transformed into useful data for learning, selected the learning model well suited to the data, trained the model to select the best model with the highest accuracy, increased its performance by using the best combination of different parameters of the model and deployed the model into the real world.  Skimming and scanning through the article I learnt about how AI cybercrime investigator could solve the problem in a faster and more efficient manner than the humans by detecting network intrusions. Viewing the first ten minutes of this video clip will enhance one’s comprehension of how AI helps in solving crime.

If you are wondering what that means or how it works, I can share my understanding of the phrase. Network intrusion is a deliberate act by which the hacker gains access to a person’s computer without the person’s consent and either uses or threatens the network or data. It is a method through which the hacker gathers information about the target via his email addresses, network details etc., and exploits patiently the target’s frequently used websites through water holing, phishing, SQL injection without being detected. The hacker performs malicious activities such as peeping into scripts or discovering run keys persistently besides installing malware in the network beginning with less harmful ones to more powerful ones. After gaining access all over the network and fulfilling the intention of exploiting whatever he wants he leaves the network as he fears detection but not before performing attacks such as Trojans, Worms, Buffer overflow attack, Asymmetric routing, Protocol specific attack etc.   

A super intelligent AI driven NIDS (Network Intrusion Detecting Systems) which protects the system from network-based threats by monitoring, analyzing its traffic, notifying to the administrator about the security of the network, by detecting Malware which aims at spying, stealing of confidential data, providing system control to intruder and slowing down the performance of the system. By installing NIDS on the subnet, catching the cybercriminal who tries to break into the firewall of the system will be a cake walk. Armed with a new level of super intelligence, businesses that offer to fight our battles, against cyber criminals on our behalf, are emerging. Such is the state of affairs!